GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY 



EDMUND GOSSE 




ft 




MS/ 



COLLECTED ESSAYS 
OF 

EDMUND GOSSE 

VOL. II 

GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY 



Br THE SAME AUTHOR 
Uniform with this Volume 

SEVENTEENTH-CENTU RYSTUDIES 
FRENCH PROFILES 
CRITICAL KIT-KATS 
PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



GOSSIP 
IN A LIBRARY 

BY 

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. 



CHARLES 



NEW YORK 

SCRIBNER'S 
1914 



SONS 



/ 



Printed in England 



V IN 1 Hi i\ I O 






PAGE 


INTRODUCTORY 


i 


CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA" 


9 


A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES 


19 


A POET IN PRISON 


29 


DEATH'S DUEL 


39 


GERARD'S HERBAL 


49 


PHARAMOND 


59 


A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS 


69 


A CENSOR OF POETS 


79 


THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY 


89 


LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS 


99 


AMASIA 


109 


LOVE AND BUSINESS 


119 


WHAT ANN LANG READ 


129 


CATS 


139 


SMART'S POEMS 


149 


POMPEY THE LITTLE 

V 


163 



vi Contents 



PAGE 

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNCLE 171 

BEAU NASH 183 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 193 

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERA- 
TURE 203 

PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS 213 

THE FANCY 22 

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS 235 

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS 243 

IONICA 25 

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT 26 

INDEX 27 



O blessed Letters, that combine in one 
Jill ages past, and make one live with all: 
<By you we doe conferre with who are gone, 
tdnd the dead-living unto councell call: 
*By you tff unborne shall have communion 
Of what we feele 9 and what doth us befall. 



%AM. DANIEL: MusophiliU. l602. 



GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY 



INTRODUCTORY 

It is curious to reflect that the library, in our custom- 
ary sense, is quite a modern institution. Three 
hundred years ago there were no public libraries in 
Europe. The Ambrosian, at Milan, dates from 1608 ; 
the Bodleian, at Oxford, from 1612. To these 
Angelo Rocca added his in Rome, in 1620. But 
private collections of books always existed, and 
these were the haunts of learning, the little glimmer- 
ing hearths over which knowledge spread her cold 
fingers, in the darkest ages of the world. To-day, 
although national and private munificence has 
increased the number of public libraries so widely 
that almost every reader is within reach of books, 
the private library still flourishes. There are men 
all through the civilised world to whom a book is 
a jewel — an individual possession of great price. 
I have been asked to gossip about my books, for I 
also am a bibliophile. But when I think of the 
great collections of fine books, of the libraries of the 
magnificent, I do not know whether I dare admit 
any stranger to glance at mine. The Mayor of 
Queenborough feels as though he were a very im- 
portant personage till Royalty drives through his 
borough without noticing his scarf and his cocked 

B 



2 



Gossip in a Library 



hat; and then, for the first time, he observes how 
small the Queenborough town-hall is. But if one 
is to gossip about books, it is, perhaps, as well that 
one should have some limits. I will leave the 
masters of bibliography to sing of greater matters, 
and will launch upon no more daring voyage than 
one aiitoiir de ma pauvre bibliotheque. 

I have heard that the late Mr. Edward Solly, a 
very pious and worshipful lover of books, under 
several examples of whose book-plate I have lately 
reverently placed my own, was so anxious to fly all 
outward noise that he built himself a library in his 
garden. I have been told that the books stood there 
in perfect order, with the rose-spray flapping at the 
window, and great Japanese vases exhaling such 
odours as most annoy an insect-nostril. The very 
bees would come to the window, and sniff, and boom 
indignantly away again. The silence there was 
perfect. It must have been in such a secluded 
library that Christian Mentzelius was at work when 
he heard the male book-worm flap his wings, and 
crow like a cock in calling to his mate. I feel sure 
that even Mentzelius, a very courageous writer, 
would hardly pretend that he could hear such a 
" shadow of all sound " elsewhere. That is the 
library I should like to have. In my sleep, " where 
dreams are multitude," I sometimes fancy that one 
day I shall have a library in a garden. The phrase 
seems to contain the whole felicity of man — " a 
library in a garden ! " It sounds like having a 
castle in Spain, or a sheep-walk in Arcadia, and I 
suppose that merely to wish for it is to be what 
indignant journalists call " a faddling hedonist." 



Introductory 3 

In the meanwhile, my books are scattered about in 
cases in different parts of a double sitting-room, 
where the cats carouse on one side, and the hurdy- 
gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A 
friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of 
ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that 
when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, 
as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his 
master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot 
have cabinets of ebony and cedar, I may just as well 
have plain deal, with common glass doors to keep 
the dust out. I detest your Persian apparatus. 

It is a curious reflection, that the ordinary private 
person who collects objects of a modest luxury, has 
nothing about him so old as his books. If a w r ave 
of the rod made everything around him disappear 
that did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly 
find himself with one or two sticks of furniture, 
perhaps, but otherwise alone with his books. Let 
the work of another century pass, and certainly 
nothing but these little brown volumes would be 
left, so many caskets full of passion and tenderness, 
disappointed ambition, fruitless hope, self-torturing 
envy, conceit aware, in maddening lucid moments, 
of its own folly. I think if Mentzelius had been 
worth his salt, those ears of his, which heard the 
book-worm crow, might have caught the echo of 
a sigh from beneath many a pathetic vellum cover. 
There is something awful to me, of nights, and when 
I am alone, in thinking of all the souls imprisoned 
in the ancient books around me. Not one, I sup- 
pose, but was ushered into the world with pride and 
glee, with a flushed cheek and heightened pulse ; not 
b 2 



4 



Gossip in a Library 



one enjoyed a career that in all points justified those 
ample hopes and flattering promises. 

The outward and visible mark of the citizenship 
of the book-lover is his book-plate. There are many 
good bibliophiles who abide in the trenches, and 
never proclaim their loyalty by a book-plate. They 
are with us, but not of us ; they lack the courage 
of their opinions; they collect with timidity or 
carelessness; they have no need for the morrow. 
Such a man is liable to great temptations. He is 
brought face to face with that enemy of his species, 
the borrower, and dares not speak with him in the 
gate. If he had a book-plate he would say, " Oh ! 
certainly I will lend you this volume, if it has not 
my book-plate in it; of course, one makes a rule 
never to lend a book that has." He would say this, 
and feign to look inside the volume, knowing right 
well that this safeguard against the borrower is there 
already. To have a book-plate gives a collector 
great serenity and self-confidence. We have laboured 
in a far more conscientious spirit since we had ours 
than we did before. A learned poet, Lord De 
Tabley, wrote a fascinating volume on book-plates, 
some years ago, with copious illustrations. There 
is not, however, one specimen in his book which I 
would exchange for mine, the work and the gift 
of one of the most imaginative of American artists, 
the late Edwin A. Abbey. It represents a very fine 
gentleman of about 1610, walking in broad sunlight 
in a garden, reading a little book of verses. The 
name is coiled around him, with the motto, Gravis 
cantantibus umbra. I will not presume to translate 
this tag of an eclogue, and I only venture to mention 



Introductory 



5 



such an uninteresting matter, that my indulgent 
readers may have a more vivid notion of what I call 
my library. Mr. Abbey's fine art is there, always 
before me, to keep my ideal high. 

To possess few books, and those not too rich and 
rare for daily use, has this advantage, that the 
possessor can make himself master of them all, can 
recollect their peculiarities, and often remind himself 
of their contents. The man that has two or three 
thousand books can be familiar with them all; he 
that has thirty thousand can hardly have a speaking 
acquaintance with more than a few. The more 
conscientious he is, the more he becomes like 
Lucian's amateur, who was so much occupied in 
rubbing the bindings of his books with sandal-wood 
and saffron, that he had no time left to study the 
contents. After all, with every due respect paid 
to " states " and editions and bindings and tall 
copies, the inside of the volume is really the essential 
part of it. 

The excuses for collecting, however, are more than 
satire is ready to admit. The first edition represents 
the author's first thought ; in it we read his words 
as he sent them out to the world in his first heat, 
with the type he chose, and with such peculiarities 
of form as he selected to do most justice to his 
creation. We often discover little individual points 
in a first edition, which never occur again. And if 
it be conceded that there is an advantage in reading 
a book in the form which the author originally 
designed for it, then all the other refinements of 
the collector become so many acts of respect paid 
to this first virgin apparition, touching and suitable 



6 



Gossip in a Library 



homage of cleanness and fit adornment. It is only 
when this homage becomes mere eye-service, when 
a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too 
delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor 
dilettantism comes in between the reader and what 
he reads. Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my 
estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding 
so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for 
perusal. To the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden- 
Sanderson, a tenpenny book in a ten-pound binding, 
I say fie. Perhaps the ideal library, after all, is a 
small one, where the books are carefully selected 
and thoughtfully arranged in accordance with one 
central code of taste, and intended to be respect- 
fully consulted at any moment by the master of 
their destinies. If fortune made me possessor of 
one book of excessive value, I should hasten to part 
with it. In a little working library, to hold a first 
quarto of Hamlet, would be like entertaining a 
reigning monarch in a small farmhouse at harvesting. 

Much has of late been written, however, and 
pleasantly written, about the collecting and pre- 
serving of books. It is not my intention here to 
add to this department of modern literature. But 
I shall select from among my volumes some which 
seem less known in detail to modern readers than 
they should be, and I shall give brief " retrospective 
reviews " of these as though they were new dis- 
coveries. In other cases, where the personal history 
of a well-known book seems worth detaching from 
our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject 
of my lucubration. Perhaps it may not be an un- 
welcome novelty to apply to old books the test we 



Introductory 



7 



so familiarly apply to new ones. They will bear 
it well, for in their case there is no temptation to 
introduce any element of prejudice. Mr. Bludyer 
himself does not fly into a passion over a squat 
volume published two centuries ago, even when, 
as in the case of the first edition of Harrington's 
Oceana, there is such a monstrous list of errata that 
the writer has to tell us, by way of excuse, that a 
spaniel has been " questing " among his papers. 

These scarce and neglected books are full of 
interesting things. Voltaire never made a more 
unfortunate observation than when he said that 
rare books were worth nothing, since, if they were 
worth anything, they would not be rare. We know 
better nowadays; we know how much there is in 
them which may appeal to only one man here and 
there, and yet to him with a voice like a clarion. 
There are books that have lain silent for a century, 
and then have spoken with the trumpet of a 
prophecy. We shall disdain nothing; we shall 
have a little criticism, a little anecdote, a little 
bibliography; and our old book shall go back to 
the shelves before it has had time to be tedious in 
its babbling. 



CAMDEN'S " BRITANNIA " 



CAMDEN'S " BRITANNIA " 



Britain : or a chorographical description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, 
England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Hands adioyning, out of the depth 
of Antiquitie : beautified ivith Mappes of the se<verall Shires of England : 
Written first in Latine by William Camden, Clarenceux K. of A. 
Translated neivly into English by Philemon Holland. Londini, Impensis 
Georgii Bishop & Joannis Nor ion, M.DC.X. 

There is no more remarkable example of the differ- 
ence between the readers of our light and hurrying 
age and those who obeyed " Eliza and our James/' 
than the fact that the book we have before us at 
this moment, a folio of some eleven hundred pages, 
adorned, like a fighting elephant, with all the 
weightiest panoply of learning, was one of the most 
popular works of its time. It went through six 
editions, this vast antiquarian itinerary, before the 
natural demand of the vulgar released it from its 
Latin austerity ; and the title-page we have quoted 
is that of the earliest English edition, specialty 
translated, under the author's eye, by Dr. Philemon 
Holland, a laborious schoolmaster of Coventry. Once 
open to the general public, although then at the 
close of its first quarter of a century, the Britannia 
flourished with a new lease of life, and continued 
to bloom, like a literary magnolia, all down the 
seventeenth century. It is now as little read as 
other famous books of uncompromising size. The 
bookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception 



ii 



12 



Gossip in a Library 



of these heroic folios, and if we want British an- 
tiquities now, we find them in terser form and more 
accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in 
the writings of later antiquaries. Giant Camden 
moulders at his cave's mouth, a huge and reverend 
form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by. But 
his once popular folio was the life work of a par- 
ticularly interesting and human person ; and without 
affecting to penetrate to the darkest corners of the 
cavern, it may be instructive to stand a little while 
on the threshold. 

When this first English edition of the Britannia 
was published, Camden was one of the most famous 
of living English writers. For one man of position 
who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be 
twenty, at least, who were quite familiar with the 
claims of the Head-master of Westminster and 
Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden was in his 
sixtieth year, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, 
violent detraction, and final triumph. His health 
was poor, but he continued to write history, eager, 
as he says, to show that " though I have been a 
studious admirer of venerable antiquity, yet have I 
not been altogether an incurious spectator of modern 
occurrences/' He stood easily first among the 
historians of his time ; he was respected and adored 
by the Court and by the Universities, and that his 
fame might be completed by the chrism of detrac- 
tion, his popularity was assured from year to year 
by the dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists 
scattered from their secret presses. It had not been 
without a struggle that Camden had attained this 
pinnacle ; and the Britannia had been his alpenstock. 



Camden's ' Britannia ' 



l 3 



This first English edition has the special interest 
of representing Camden's last thoughts. It is 
nominally a translation of the sixth Latin edition, 
but it has a good deal of additional matter supplied 
to Philemon Holland by the author, whereas later 
English issues containing fresh material are believed 
to be so far spurious. The Britannia grew with the 
life of Camden. He tells us that it was when he was 
a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on his 
professional career as second master in Westminster 
School, that the famous Dutch geographer, Abraham 
Ortelius, " dealt earnestly with me that I would 
illustrate this isle of Britain/ ' This was no light 
task to undertake in 1577. The authorities were 
few, and these in the highest degree occasional or 
fragmentary. It was not a question of compil- 
ing a collection of topographical antiquities. The 
whole process had to be gone through " from the 
egg." 

As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his 
best attention to this branch of study, and what the 
ancients had written about England was intimately 
known to him. Any one who looks at his book will 
see that the first 180 pages of the Britannia could 
be written by a scholar without stirring from his 
chair at Westminster. But when it came to the 
minute description of the counties there was nothing 
for it but personal travel ; and accordingly Camden 
spent what holidays he could snatch from his 
labours as a schoolmaster in making a deliberate 
survey of the divisions of England. We possess 
some particulars of one of these journeys, that which 
occupied 1582, in which he started by Suffolk, 



Gossip in a Library 



through Yorkshire, and returned through Lanca- 
shire. He was a very rapid worker, he spared no 
pains, and in 1586, nine years after Ortelius set him 
going, his first draft was issued from the press. In 
later times, and when his accuracy had been cruelly 
impeached, he set forth his claims to attention with 
dignity. He said : "I have in no wise neglected 
such things as are most material to search and sift 
out the truth. I have attained to some skill of the 
most ancient British and Anglo-Saxon tongues; I 
have travelled over all England for the most part, 
I have conferred with most skilful observers in each 
county. ... I have been diligent in the records 
of this realm. I have looked into most libraries, 
registers and memorials of churches, cities and 
corporations, I have pored upon many an old roll 
and evidence . . . that the honour of verity might 
in no wise be impeached." 

It was no slight task to undertake such a work on 
such a scale. And when the first Latin edition 
appeared, it was hailed as a first glory in the diadem 
of Elizabeth. Specialists in particular counties 
found that Camden knew more about their little 
circle than they themselves had taken all their 
lives to learn. Lombard, the great Kentish anti- 
quary, said that he never knew Kent properly, till 
he read of it in the Britannia. But Camden was 
not content to rest on his laurels. Still, year by 
year, he made his painful journeys through the 
length and breadth of the land, and still, as new 
editions were called forth, the book grew from octavo 
into folio. Suddenly, about twelve years after its 
first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, 



Camden's ' Britannia ' 



15 



like a bolt out of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, 
called Discovery of certain Errors Published in the 
much-commended Britannia, which created a fine 
storm in the antiquarian teapot. This attack was 
the work of a man who would otherwise be for- 
gotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald. He had 
formerly been an admirer of Camden's, his " humble 
friend/' he called himself; but when Camden was 
promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of- 
Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it became his 
duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a 
charlatan. He accordingly fired off the unpleasant 
little gun already mentioned, and, for the moment, he 
hit Camden rather hard. 

The author of the Britannia, to justify his new 
advancement, had introduced into a fresh edition 
of his book a good deal of information regarding the 
descent of barons and other noble families. This 
was York Herald's own subject, and he was able 
to convict Camden of a startling number of negli- 
gences, and what he calls " many gross mis takings." 
The worst part of it was that York Herald had 
privately pointed out these blunders to Camden, 
and that the latter had said it was too much trouble 
to alter them. This, at least, is what the enemy 
states in his attack, and if this be true, it can hardly 
be doubted that Camden had sailed too long in fair 
weather, or that he needed a squall to recall him to 
the duties of the helm. He answered Brooke, who 
replied with increased contemptuous tartness. It 
is admitted that Camden was indiscreet in his 
manner of reply, and that some genuine holes had 
been pricked in his heraldry. But the Britannia 



1 6 Gossip in a Library 



lay high out of the reach of fatal pedantic attack, 
and this little cloud over the reputation of the book 
passed entirely away, and is ^remembered now only 
as a curiosity of literature. 

In the preface the author quaintly admits that 
" many have found a defect in this work that maps 
were not adjoined, which do allure the eyes by 
pleasant portraitures, . . . yet my ability could not 
compass it." They must, then, have been added 
at the last by a generous afterthought, for this 
book is full of maps. The maritime ones are adorned 
with ships in full sail, and bold sea-monsters with 
curly tails ; the inland ones are speckled with trees 
and spires and hillocks. In spite of these old- 
fashioned oddities, the maps are remarkably 
accurate. They are signed by John Nor den and 
William Kip, the master map-makers of that reign. 
The book opens with an account of the first in- 
habitants of Britain, and their manners and customs ; 
how the Romans fared, and what antiquities they left 
behind, with copious plates of Roman coins. By de- 
grees we come down, through Saxons and Normans, 
to that work which was peculiarly Camden's, the 
topographical antiquarianism. He begins with 
Cornwall, " that region which, according to the 
geographers, is the first of all Britain/ ' and then 
proceeds to what he calls " Denshire " and we 
Devonshire, a county, as he remarks, " barbarous on 
either side." 

With page 822 he finds himelf at the end of his 
last English county, Northumberland, looking across 
the Tweed to Berwick, " the strongest hold in all 
Britain," where it is " no marvel that soldiers with- 



Camden's 'Britannia 5 17 



out other light do play here all night long at dice, 
considering the side light that the sunbeams cast all 
night long." This rather exaggerated statement is 
evidently that of a man accustomed to look upon 
Berwick as the northernmost point of his country, 
as we shall all do, no doubt, when Scotland has 
secured Home Rule. We are, therefore, not sur- 
prised to find Scotland added, in a kind of hurried 
appendix, in special honour to James I and VI. The 
introduction to the Scottish section is in a queer 
tone of banter; Camden knows little and cares less 
about the " commonwealth of the Scots/' and 
" withall will lightly pass over it." In point of fact, 
he gets to Duncansby Head in fifty-two pages, and 
not without some considerable slips of information. 
Ireland interests him more, and he finally closes 
with a sheet of learned gossip about the outlying 
islands. 

The scope of Camden's work did not give Philemon 
Holland much opportunity for spreading the wings 
of his style. Anxious to present Camden fairly, 
the translator is curiously uneven in manner, now 
stately, now slipshod, weaving melodious sentences, 
but forgetting to tie them up with a verb. He is 
commonly too busy with hard facts to be a Euphuist. 
But here is a pretty and ingenious passage about 
Cambridge, unusually popular in manner, and ex- 
ceedingly handsome in the mouth of an Oxford 
man : 

" On this side the bridge, where standeth the 
greater part by far of the City, you have a pleasant 
sight everywhere to the eye, what of fair streets 
orderly ranged, what of a number of churches, and 
c 



i8 



Gossip in a Library 



of sixteen colleges, sacred mansions of the Muses, 
wherein a number of great learned men are main- 
tained, and wherein the knowledge of the best arts, 
and the skill in tongues, so flourish, that they may 
rightly be counted the fountains of literature, religion 
and all knowledge whatsoever, who right sweetly 
bedew and sprinkle, with most wholesome waters, 
the gardens of the Church and Commonwealth 
through England. Nor is there wanting anything 
here, that a man may require in a most flourishing 
University, were it not that the air is somewhat 
unhealthful, arising as it doth out of a fenny ground 
hard by. And yet, peradventure, they that first 
founded a University in that place, allowed of Plato's 
judgment. For he, being of a very excellent and 
strong constitution of body, chose out the Academia, 
an unwholesome place of Attica, for to study in, and 
so the superfluous rankness of body which might 
overlay the mind, might be kept under by the dis- 
temperature of the place." 

The poor scholars in the mouldering garrets of 
Clare, looking over waste land to the oozy Cam, no 
doubt wished that their foundress had been less 
Spartan. Very little of the domestic architecture 
that Camden admired in Cambridge is now left; 
and yet probably it and Oxford are the two places 
of all which he describes that it would give him least 
trouble to identify if he came to life again three 
hundred years after the first appearance of his 
famous Britannia. 



A ^MIRROR 
FOR MAGISTRATES 



A MIRROR 
FOR MAGISTRATES 

A MlROVR FOR Magistrates : being a true Chronicle Historic of the untimely 
falles of such vnforiunate Princes and men of note, as haue happened since 

the frst entrance of Brute into this Hand, <vntill this our latter Age. 

Neiuly enlarged ivith a last part, called A Winter NlGHTS Vision, 

being an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are exempted in the 
former Historie, ivith a Poem annexed, called England's Eliza. At 

London. Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, 1 6 10. 

This huge quarto of 875 pages, all in verse, is the 
final form, though far from the latest impression, 
of a poetical miscellany which had been swelling 
and spreading for nearly sixty years without ever 
losing its original character. We may obtain some 
imperfect notion of the Mirror for Magistrates if 
we imagine a composite poem planned by Sir Walter 
Scott, and contributed to by Words w r orth and 
Southey, being still issued, generation after genera- 
tion, with additions by the youngest versifiers of 
to-day. The Mirror for Magistrates was conceived 
when Mary's protomartyrs were burning at Smith- 
field, and it was not finished until James I. had been 
on the throne seven years. From first to last, at 
least sixteen writers had a finger in this pie, and the 
youngest of them was not born when the eldest of 
them died. 

It is commonly said, even by such exact critics as 
the late Dean Church, that the Mirror for Magistrates 
was planned by the most famous of the poets who 

21 



22 



Gossip in a Library 



took part in its execution, Thomas Sackville, Lord 
Buckhurst. If a very clever man is combined in 
any enterprise with people of less prominence, it is 
ten to one that he gets all the credit of the adventure. 
But the evidence on this point goes to prove that it 
was not until the work was well advanced that 
Sackville contributed to it at all. The inventor of 
the Mirror for Magistrates seems, rather, to have 
been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer and poli- 
tician, who was master of the King's Pastimes at the 
very close of Henry VIII. 's reign. Ferrers was 
ambitious to create a drama in England, and lacked 
only genius to be the British iEschylus. The time 
was not ripe, but he was evidently very anxious to 
set the world tripping to his goatherd's pipe. He 
advertised for help in these designs, and the list of 
persons he wanted is an amusing one ; he was willing 
to engage " a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, 
a poet, a physician, an apothecary, a master of 
requests, a civilian, a clown, two gentlemen ushers, 
besides jugglers, tumblers, fools, friars, and such 
others." Fortune sent him, from Oxford, one 
William Baldwin, who was most of these things, 
especially divine and poet, and who became Ferrers' 
confidential factotum. The master and assistant- 
master of Pastimes were humming merrily on at their 
masques and triumphs, when the King expired. 
Under Queen Mary, revels might not flourish, but 
the friendship between Ferrers and Baldwin did not 
cease. They planned a more doleful but more 
durable form of entertainment, and the Mirror for 
Magistrates was started. Those who claim for 
Sackville the main part of this invention, forget 



A Mirror for Magistrates 23 



that he is not mentioned as a contributor till what 
was really the third edition, and that, when the 
first went to press, he was only eighteen years of age. 

Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age 
when he conceived the notion of a series of poems, 
in which famous kings and nobles should describe 
in their own persons the frailty and instability of 
worldly prosperity, even in those whom Fortune 
seems most highly to favour. One of the most 
popular books of the preceding century had been 
Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the 
calamities of illustrious men, a vast monody in 
nine books, all harping on that single chord of the 
universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's Fall of 
Princes had, by the time that Mary ascended the 
throne, existed in popular esteem for a hundred 
years. Its language and versification were now so 
antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that 
princes should fall to a more modern measure. 

The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book 
went to press early in 1555, but of this edition only 
one or two fragments exist. It was " hindered by 
the Lord Chancellor that then was," Stephen 
Gardiner, and was entirely suppressed. The leaf 
in the British Museum is closely printed in double 
columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers 
meant to make a huge volume of it. The death of 
Mary removed the embargo, and before Elizabeth 
had been Queen for many months, the second (or 
genuine first) edition of the Myrroure for Magistrates 
made its appearance, a thin quarto, charmingly 
printed in two kinds of type. This contained 
twenty lives — Haslewood, the only critic who has 



2 4 



Gossip in a Library 



described this edition, says nineteen, but he over- 
looked Ferrers' tale of " Humphrey, Duke of 
Gloucester " — and was the work, so Baldwin tells 
us, of seven persons besides himself. 

The first story in the book, a story which finally 
appears at p. 276 of the edition before us, recounts 
the " Fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of 
England, and other of his fellows, for misconstruing 
the laws and expounding them to serve the Prince's 
affections, Anno 1388/' The manner in which this 
story is presented is a good example of the mode 
adopted throughout the miscellany. The corrupt 
judge and his fellow-lawyers appear, as in a mirror, 
or like personages behind the illuminated sheet at 
the " Chat Noir," and lamentably recount their 
woes in chorus. The story of Tresilian was written 
by Ferrers, but the persons who speak it address his 
companion : 

Baldwin, we beseech thee with our names to begin 

— which support Baldwin's claim to be looked upon 
as the editor of the whole book. It is very dreary 
doggerel, it must be confessed, but no worse than 
most of the poetry indited in England at that un- 
inspired moment in the national history. A short 
example — a flower culled from any of these pro- 
miscuous thickets — will suffice to give a general 
notion of the garden. Here is part of the lament 
of " The Lord Clifford " : 

Because my father Lord John Clifford died, 
Slain at St. Alban's, in his prince's aid, 

Against the Duke my heart for malice fired, 
So that I could from wreck no way be stayed, 
But, to avenge my father f s death, assayed 



A Mirror for Magistrates 25 



All means I might the Duke of York to annoy, 
And all his kin and friends for to destroy. 

This made me with my bloody dagger wound 
His guiltless son, that never 'gainst me stored ; 

His father's body lying dead on ground 

To 'pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword 
To fart his neck, and with his head to board, 

Invested with a royal paper crown, 

From place to place to bear it up and down. 

But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge 
Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death ; 

Repentance self that other sins may purge 

Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth ; 
Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath, 

For sudden vengeance suddenly alights 

On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites. 

The only contribution to this earliest form of the 
Mirror which is attributed to an eminent writer, is 
the " Edward IV " of Skelton, and this is one of 
the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of a 
whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night 
by some unhappy minstrel that has got no work 
to do. As Baldwin professes to quote it from 
memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its 
versification suffered in his hands. 

This is not the place to enter minutely into the 
history of the building up of this curious book. The 
next edition, that of 1563, was enriched by Sack- 
ville's splendid " Induction " and the tale of 
" Buckingham," both of which are comparatively 
known so well, and have been so often reprinted 
separately, that I need not dwell upon them here. 
They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume 
before us. In 1574 a very voluminous contributor 
to the constantly swelling tide of verse appears. 



26 



Gossip in a Library 



Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in 
Guernsey Castle, thought that the magisterial ladies 
had been neglected, and proceeded in 1578 to sing 
the fall of princesses. It is needless to continue the 
roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out the 
remarkable fact that each new candidate held up the 
mirror to the magistrates so precisely in the manner 
of his predecessors, that it is difficult to distinguish 
Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard from Niccols. 

Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the col- 
lection in its final state, was a person of adventure, 
who had fought against Cadiz in the Ark, and 
understood the noble practice of the science of 
artillery. By the time it came down to him, in 
1610, the Mirror for Magistrates had attained such 
a size that he was obliged to omit what had formed 
a pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which 
knit the tales in verse together, such pleasant familiar 
chatter between the poets as " Ferrers, said Baldwin, 
take you the chronicles and mark them as they 
come/' and the like. It was a pity to lose all this, 
but Niccols had additions of his own verse to make ; 
ten new legends entitled " A Winter Night's Vision/' 
and a long eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, " England's 
Eliza." He would have been more than human, 
if he had not considered all this far more valuable 
than the old prose babbling in black letter. This 
copy of mine is of the greatest rarity, for it contains 
two dedicatory sonnets by Richard Niccols, one 
addressed to Lady Elizabeth Clere and the other 
to the Earl of Nottingham, which seem to have been 
instantly suppressed, and are only known to exist 
in this and, I believe, one or two other examples of 



A Mirror for Magistrates 27 



the book. These are, perhaps, worth reprinting for 
their curiosity. The first runs as follows : — 

My Muse, that whilom wail'd those Briton kings, 

Who unto her in vision did appear, 

Craves leave to strengthen her night-weathered wings 
In the warm sunshine of your golden Clere [clear] ; 
Where she, fair Lady, tuning her chaste lays 

Of England's Empress to her hymnic string 
For your affect, to hear that virgin's praise, 

Makes choice of your chaste self to hear her sing, 
Whose royal worth, {true virtue's paragon?) 

Here made me dare to engrave your worthy name, 
In hope that unto you the same alone 

Will so excuse me of presumptuous blame, 
That graceful entertain my Muse may find 
And even bear such grace in thankful mind. 

The sonnet to the Earl of Nottingham, the famous 
admiral and quondam rival of Sir Walter Raleigh, is 
more interesting : — 

As once that dove (true honour's aged Lord), 

Hovering with wearied wings about your ark, 
When Cadiz towers did fall beneath your sword, 

To rest herself did single out that bark, 
So my meek Muse, — from all that conquering rout, 

Conducted through the sea's wild wilderness 
By your great self, to grave their names about 

The Iberian pillars of Jove' s Hercules, — 
Most humbly craves your lordly lion's aid 

'Gainst monster envy, while she tells her story 
Of Britain's princes, and that royall maid 

In whose chaste hymn her Clio sings your glory, 
Which if, great Lord, you grant, my Muse shall frame 
Mirrors most worthy your renowned name. 

But apparently the " great Lord " would not grant 
permission, and so the sonnet had to be rigorously 
suppressed. 



28 



Gossip in a Library 



The Mirror for Magistrates has ceased to be more 
than a curiosity and a collector's rarity, but it once 
assumed a very ambitious function. It was a serious 
attempt to build up, as a cathedral is built by suc- 
cessive architects, a great national epic, the work of 
many hands. In a gloomy season of English history, 
in a violent age of tyranny, fanaticism, and legalised 
lawlessness, it endeavoured to present, to all whom 
it might concern, a solemn succession of discrowned 
tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws 
they had made. Sometimes, in its bold and not 
very delicate way, the Mirror for Magistrates is im- 
pressive still from its lofty moral tone, its gloomy 
fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. 
As we read its sombre pages we see the wheel of 
fortune revolving; the same motion which makes 
the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges 
it at the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. 
Steadily, uniformly, the unflinching poetasters 
grind out in their monotonous rime royal how 
" Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace/' and how 
" Sir Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless 
imprisoned and cruelty wounded"; how " King 
Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts," and how 
" Sigeburt, for his wicked life, was thrust from his 
throne and miserably slain by a herdsman." It 
gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise 
that the immense popularity of this book must have 
been mainly due to the fact that it comforted the 
multitudes who groaned under a harsh and violent 
despotism to be told over and over again that cruel 
kings and unjust judges habitually came at last to 
a bad end. 



A POET IN PRISON 



A POET IN PRISON 



The Shepheards Hunting : being Certain Eclogues ivritten during the time of 
the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther, 
Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are 
to be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre. 1 6 1 5 • 

If ever a man needed resuscitation in our anti- 
quarian times it was George Wither. When most 
of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable oblivion, 
which merely meant being laid with a piece of 
camphor in cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither 
had the misfortune to be recollected. He became 
a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne per- 
sistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, 
only possessed really by one distinguished person, 
Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy. Swift, in The Battle 
of the Books, brings in this poet as the meanest 
common trooper that he can mention in his modern 
army. Pope speaks of him with the utmost freedom 
as " wretched Withers/' It is true that he lived 
too long and wrote too much — a great deal too 
much. Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than 
one hundred of his publications, and some of them 
are wonderfully unattractive. I should not like to 
be shut up on a rainy day with his Salt upon Salt, 
which seems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn 
to blow upon his Tuba Pacifica, although it was " dis- 
posed of rather for love than money/ ' The truth is 
that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was 

31 



3* 



Gossip in a Library 



an upright, honest, and patriotic man who un- 
happily developed into a scold, and got into the 
bad habit of pouring out " precautions/' " cautional 
expressions/' " prophetic phrensies," " epistles at 
random/' " personal contributions to the national 
humiliation," " passages/' " raptures," and " al- 
larums," until he really became the greatest bore 
in Christendom. It was Charles Lamb who swept 
away this whole tedious structure of Wither's later 
writings and showed us what a lovely poet he was 
in his youth. 

When the book before us was printed, George 
Wither was aged twenty-seven. He had just 
stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea Prison, and 
his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest 
against having been put there at all and deprecation 
of being put there again. Let no one waste the tear 
of sensibility over that shell of the Marshalsea 
Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family 
of the Dorrits languished in quite another place from 
the original Marshalsea of Wither's time, although 
that also lay across the water in Southwark. It is 
said that the prison was used for the confinement of 
persons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about 
the Court. Wither, as we shall see, makes a great 
parade of telling us why he was imprisoned; but 
his language is obscure. Perhaps he was afraid 
to be explicit. In 1613 he had published a little 
volume of satires, called Abuses stript and whipt. 
This had been very popular, running into six or 
seven editions within a short time, and some one 
in office, no doubt, had fitted on the fool's cap. 
Five years later the poor poet would have had a 



A Poet in Prison 



33 



chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, as 
a " debauched person as it was, the Marshalsea 
seems to have been tolerably unpleasant. We 
gather, however, that he enjoyed some alleviations. 
He could say, like Leigh Hunt, " the visits of my 
friends were the bright side of my captivity ; I read 
verses without end, and wrote almost as many." 
The poems we have before us were written in the 
Marshalsea. The book itself is very tiny and pretty, 
with a sort of leafy trellis-work at the top and 
bottom of every page, almost suggesting a little 
posy of wild-flowers thrown through the iron bars 
of the poet's cage, and pressed between the pages of 
his manuscript. Nor is there any book of Withers 
which breathes more deeply of the perfume of the 
fields than this which was written in the noisome 
seclusion of the Marshalsea. 

Although the title-page assures us that these 
" eglogues " were written during the author's im- 
prisonment, we may have a suspicion that the first 
three were composed just after his release. They 
are very distinct from the rest in form and char- 
acter. To understand them we must remember 
that in 1614, just before the imprisonment, Wither 
had taken a share with his bosom friend, William 
Browne, of the Inner Temple, in bringing out a little 
volume of pastrorals, called The Shepherd's Pipe. 
Browne, a poet who deserves well of all Devonshire 
men, was two years younger than Wither, and had 
just begun to come before the public as the author 
of that charming, lazy, Virgilian poem of Britannia's 
Pastorals. There was something of Keats in 
Browne, an artist who let the world pass him by; 

D 



34 



Gossip in a Library 



something of Shelley in Wither, a prophet who 
longed to set his seal on human progress. In the 
Shepherd's Pipe Willy (William Browne) and Roget 
(Geo-t-r) had been the interlocutors, and Christopher 
Brooke, another rhyming friend, had written an 
eclogue under the mame of Cutty. These person- 
ages reappear in The Shepherd's Hunting, and give 
us a glimpse of pleasant personal relations. In the 
first " eglogue," Willy comes to the Marshalsea one 
afternoon to condole with Roget, but finds him very 
cheerful. The prisoner poet assures his friend that 

This barren place yields somewhat to relieve \ 

For I have found sufficient to content me, 

And more true blijs than ever freedom lent me ; 

and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, re- 
joiced to find that " the cage doth some birds good." 
Next morning he returns and brings Cutty, or Cuddy, 
with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisoner 
that all England is taking an interest in him, and 
that this adversity has made him much more 
popular than he was before. But Willy and Cuddy 
are extremely anxious to know what it was that 
caused Roget's imprisonment, and at last he agrees 
to tell them. Hitherto the poem has been written 
in ottava rima, a form which is sufficiently uncom- 
mon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to 
demand special notice in this case. In a prose post- 
script to this book Wither tells us that the title, 
The Shepherd's Hunting, which he seems to feel needs 
explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should 
say now, to the publisher. But perhaps this was an 
after-thought, for in the account he gives to Willy 



A Poet in Prison 



35 



and Cuddy he certainly suggests the title himself. 
He represents himself as the shepherd given up to the 
delights of hunting the human passions through the 
soul ; the simile seems a little confused, because he 
represents these qualities not as the quarry, but as 
the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon is reversed ; 
instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the 
master hunts his dogs. At all events, the result is 
that he " dips his staff in blood, and onwards leads 
his thunder to the wood/' where he is ignominiously 
captured by his Majesty's gamekeeper. But the 
allegory hardly runs upon all-fours. 

The next " eglogue " represents again another 
visit to the prisoner, and this time Willy and Cuddy 
bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is John 
Da vies, of Hereford, another contributor to The 
Shepherd's Pipe. Roget starts his allegory again, 
in the same mild, satiric manner he had adopted, 
to his hurt, in Abuses stript and whipt. Wither 
becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness 
breaks through this satirical philosophy, and when 
he tells us : 

But though that all the world's delight forsake me, 
I have a Muse, and she shall music make me ; 
Whose aery notes, in spite of closest cages, 
Shall give content to me and after ages. 

They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful 
poets of Elizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity 
has seen proper to admit the claim in more instances 
than might well have been expected. 

But the delightful part of The Shepherd's Hunting 
has yet to come. With the fourth '* eglogue " the 
caged bird begins to sing like a lark at Heaven's gate, 
D 2 



36 Gossip in a Library 



and it is the prisoned man — who ought to be in 
doleful dumps — that rallies his free friend Browne 
on his low spirits. It is time, he says, to be merry : 

Coridon, with his bold rout, 
Hath already been about, 
For the elder shepherds 9 dole, 
And fetched in the summer pole; 
Whilst the rest have built a bower 
To defend them from a shower, 
Sealed so close, with boughs all green, 
Titan cannot pry between ; 
Now the dairy-wenches dream 
Of their strawberries and cream, 
And each doth herself advance, 
To be taken in to dance. 

What summer thoughts are these to come from a 
pale prisoner in the hot and putrid Marshalsea ! 
They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or 
proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above 
a mortal pitch. But Willy declines to join the Lady 
of the May at her high junketings; he also has 
troubles, and prefers to whisper them through 
Roget's iron bars. There are those who " my Music 
do contemn/ ' who will none of the poetry of Master 
William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless 
for him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the 

Cups of turned maple-root, 
Whereupon the skilful man 
Hath engraved the Loves of Pan, 

or contend for the " fine napkin wrought with 
blue/' if those base clowns called critics are busy 
with his detraction. But Roget instructs him that 
Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a true 
poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and 



A Poet in Prison 



37 



beyond all racks of envious cloud, and that the last 
thing he should do is to despair. He rises to his own 
greatest and best work in this encouragement of a 
brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble 
verses as these dare question Wither's claim to a 
fauteuil in the Academy of Parnassus : 

// thy Verse do bravely tower 
As she makes wing, she gets power, 
Tet the higher she doth soar, 
She's affronted still the more; 
Till she to the highest hath fast, 
Then she rests with Fame at last. 
Let nought therefore thee affright, 
But make forward in thy flight; 
For if I could match thy rhyme 
To the very stars Fd climb, 
There begin again, and fly 
Till I reached Eternity. 

In the fifth " eglogue " Roget and Alexis compare 
notes about their early happiness in phrases of an 
odd commixture. The pastoral character of the 
poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of how 
Roget on a great occasion played a match at foot- 
ball, " having scarce twenty Satyrs on his side," 
against some of " the best tried Ruffians in the land." 
Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of 
Thames, and though the satyrs and their laureate 
leader were worsted, the moral victory, as people 
call it, remained with the latter. All this is an 
allegory ; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of 
innuendo all through The Shepherd's Hunting. 

The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty 
of tuneful youth : All for Verse and the World well 
lost. The enemy is around them on all sides, jailers 



38 



Gossip in a Library 



of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evil 
shepherds that preside over grates of steel and 
noisome beds of straw, but Youth has its mocking 
answer to all these : 

Let them disdain and fret till they are weary ! 
We in ourselves have that shall make us merry ; 
Which he that wants and had the 'power to know it, 
Would give his life that he might die a poet. 

It was no small thing to be suffering for Apollo's 
sake in 1614. Shakespeare might hear of it at 
Stratford, and talk of the prisoner as he strolled 
with some friend on the banks of Avon. A greater 
than Shakespeare — as most men thought in those 
days — Ben Jonson himself, might talk the matter 
over " at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun, The 
Dog, the triple Tun ' ' ; for had not he himself lan- 
guished in a worse dungeon and under a heavier 
charge than Wither ? To be seven-and-twenty, to 
be in trouble with the Government about one's 
verses, and to have other young poets, in a ferment 
of enthusiasm, clinging like swallows to the prison- 
bars — how delicious a torment ! And to know 
that it will soon be over, and that the sweet, pure 
meadows lie just outside the reek of South wark, that 
summer lingers still and that shepherds pipe and 
play, that Fame is sitting by her cheerful fountain 
with a garland for the weary head, and that lasses, 
" who more excell Than the sweet- voic'd Philomel/ ' 
are ready to cluster round the interesting captive, 
and lead him away in daisy-chains — what could be 
more consolatory ! And we close the little dainty 
volume, with its delicate perfume of friendship and 
poetry and hope. 



DEATH'S DUEL 



DEATH'S DUEL 



Death's Dvell ; or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, ana 
lining Death of the Body. Deliuered in a Sermon at White Hall, before 
the King's Maiesty, in the beginning of Lent, 1 630. By that late learned 
and Reuerend Diuine, John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, Zlf Deane of 
S. Pauls, London. Being his last Sermon, and called by his Maiesties 
houshold The Doctor's oivne Funerall Sermon. London, Printed by 
Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Benjamin Fisher, and are to be 
sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders -gate street. AfDCXXXII. 

The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous 
title depends entirely, so far as the collector is con- 
cerned, on whether or no it possesses the frontispiece. 
So many people, not having the fear of books before 
their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former, 
that a perfect copy of Death's Duel is quite a capture 
over which the young bibliophile may venture to 
glory ; but let him not fancy that he has a prize if 
his copy does not possess the portrait-plate. One 
has but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece 
to see that there is here something very much out 
of the common. It is engraved in the best seven- 
teenth-century style, and represents, apparently, 
the head and bust of a dead man wrapped in a 
winding-sheet. The eyes are shut, the mouth is 
drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly. 

Yet it is not really the picture of a dead man : it 
represents the result of one of the grimmest freaks 
that ever entered into a pious mind. In the early 
part of March 1630 (1631), the great Dr. Donne, 
Dean of St. Paul's, being desperately ill, and not 

41 



42 Gossip in a Library 



likely to recover, called a wood-carver in to the 
Deanery, and ordered a small urn, just large enough 
to hold his feet, and a board as long as his body, to 
be produced. When these articles were ready, they 
were brought into his study, which was first warmed, 
and then the old man stripped off his clothes, 
wrapped himself in a winding-sheet which was open 
only so far as to reveal the face and beard, and then 
stood upright in the little wooden urn, supported by 
leaning against the board. His limbs were arranged 
like those of dead persons, and when his eyes had 
been closed, a painter was introduced into the room, 
and desired to make a full-length and full-size 
picture of this terrific object, this solemn theatrical 
presentment of life in death. The frontispiece of 
Death's Duel gives a reproduction of the upper part 
of this picture. It was said to be a remarkably 
truthful portrait of the great poet and divine, and 
it certainly agrees in all its proportions with the 
accredited portrait of Donne as a young man. 

It appears (for Walton's account is not precise) 
that it was after standing for this grim picture, 
but before its being finished, that the Dean preached 
his last sermon, that which is here printed. He had 
come up from Essex in great physical weakness in 
order not to miss his appointment to preach in his 
cathedral before the King on the first Friday in 
Lent. He entered the pulpit with so emaciated a 
frame and a face so pale and haggard, and spoke 
with a voice so faint and hollow, that at the end the 
King himself turned to one of his suite, and whis- 
pered, " The Dean has preached his own funeral 
sermon ! " So, indeed, it proved to be; for he 



Death's Duel 



43 



presently withdrew to his bed, and summoned his 
friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died 
very gradually after about a fortnight, his last words 
being, not in distress or anguish, but as it would 
seem in visionary rapture : "I were miserable if I 
might not die." All this fortnight and to the 
moment of his death, the terrible life-sized portrait 
of himself in his winding-sheet stood near his bed- 
side, where it could be the " hourly object " of his 
attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of 
the seventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if 
the most eccentric, of its lyrical poets passed away in 
the very pomp of death, on the 31st of March, 1631. 

There was something eminently calculated to 
arrest and move the imagination in such an end as 
this, and people were eager to read the discourse 
which the " sacred authority " of his Majesty him- 
self had styled the Dean's funeral sermon. It was 
therefore printed in 1632. As sermons of the period 
go it is not long, yet it takes a full hour to read it 
slowly aloud, and we may thus estimate the strain 
which it must have given to the worn-out voice and 
body of the Dean to deliver it. The present writer 
once heard a very eminent Churchman, who was 
also a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age 
of ninety. This was the Danish bishop Grundtvig. 
In that case the effort of speaking, the extraction, 
as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from the 
shrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten 
minutes. But the English divines of the Jacobean 
age, like their Scottish brethren of to-day, were 
accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from 
their very diaconate. 



44 Gossip in a Library 



The sermon is one of the most " creepy " frag- 
ments of theological literature it would be easy to 
find. It takes as its text the words from the sixty- 
eighth Psalm : " And unto God the Lord belong the 
issues of death." In long, stern sentences of sonor- 
ous magnificence, adorned with fine similes and 
gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a king 
might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from 
no physical horror and no ghostly terror of the great 
crisis which he was himself to be the first to pass 
through. " That which we call life," he says, and 
our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we 
listen, " is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, 
seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, 
a dying seven times over, and there is an end. Our 
birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, 
and youth and rest die in age, and age also dies and 
determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of in- 
fancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a Phoenix out 
of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but 
as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake 
out of dung." We can comprehend how an audience 
composed of men and women whose ne'er-do-weel 
relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such 
tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur 
would themselves snatch a sacred pleasure from 
awful language of this kind in the pulpit. There is 
not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive or 
consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the 
modern sense. The effect aimed at is that of horror, 
of solemn preparation for the advent of death, as by 
one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to lose 
some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the 



Death's Duel 



45 



vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most in- 
genious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose 
life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible 
of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to pre- 
serve to the very last his powers of unflinching 
spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose 
reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed 
to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his 
fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar with the 
idea of Death, and greeted him as a welcome old 
friend whose face he was glad to look on long and 
closely. 

The leaves at the end of this little book are filled 
up with two copies of funeral verses on Dean Donne. 
These are unsigned, but we know from other sources 
to whom to attribute them. Each is by an eminent 
man. The first was written by Dr. Henry King, 
then the royal chaplain, and afterward Bishop of 
Chichester, to whom the Dean had left, besides a 
model in gold of the Synod of Dort, that painting of 
himself in the winding-sheet of which we have 
already spoken. This portrait Dr. King put into 
the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor, who 
made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the 
little urn concealing the feet. This was placed in 
St. Paul's Cathedral, of which King was chief resi- 
dentiary, and may still be seen in the present 
Cathedral. King's elegy is very prosy in starting, 
but improves as it goes along, and is most ingenious 
throughout. These are the words in which he refers 
to the appearance of the dying preacher in the pulpit : 

Thou (like the dying Swan) didst lately sing 
Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King; 



46 Gossip in a Library 



When pale looks, and weak accents of thy breath 
Presented so to life that piece of death, 
That it was feared and prophesied by all 
Thou thither earnest to preach thy funeral. 

The other elegy is believed to have been written 
by a young man of twenty-one, who was modestly 
and enthusiastically seeking the company of the most 
famous London wits. This was Edward Hyde, thirty 
years later to become Earl of Clarendon, and finally 
to leave behind him manuscripts which should prove 
him the first great English historian. His verses here 
bespeak his good intention, but no facility in 
rhyming. 

It was left for the riper disciples of the great divine 
to sing his funerals in more effective numbers. Of 
the crowd of poets who attended him with music to 
the grave, none expressed his merits in such excellent 
verses or with so much critical judgment as Thomas 
Carew, the king's sewer in ordinary. It is not so 
well known but that we quote some lines from it : 

The fire 

That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir, 

Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath, 

Glowed here awhile, lies quenched now in thy death. 

The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds 

Overspread, was purged by thee, the lazy seeds 

Of servile imitation thrown away, 

And fresh invention planted ; thou disdt pay 

The debts of our penurious bankrupt age. 
# # * # # 

Whatsoever wrong 
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue, 
Thou hast redeemed, and opened us a mine 
Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line 
Of masculine expression, which, had good 
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood 



Death's Duel 



Our superstitious fools admire, and hold 

Their lead more precious than thy burnished gold, 

Thou hadst been their exchequer. . . . 

Let others carve the rest ; it will suffice 

I on thy grave this epitaph incise : — 

Here lies a King, that ruled as he thought -fit 

The universal monarchy of wit ; 

Here lies two Flamens, and both these the best, — 

Apollo's first, at last the True God's priest. 

There was no full memoir of Dr. Donne until it 
was the privilege of the present writer, in 1900, to 
publish his Life and Letters in two substantial 
volumes. Since then, in 1912, his Poetical Works 
have been edited and sifted, with remarkable delicacy 
and judgment, by Professor Grierson. It is now, 
therefore, as easy as it can be expected ever to be to 
follow the career of this extraordinary man, with all 
its cold and hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, 
its Roman passion, and the high and clouded austerity 
of its final Anglicanism. Donne is one of the most 
fascinating, in some ways one of the most inscrut- 
able, figures in our literature, and we may contem- 
plate him with instruction from his first wild 
escapade into the Azores down to his voluntary 
penitence in the pulpit and the winding-sheet. 



GERARD'S HERBAL 



E 



GERARD'S HERBAL 



The Herball or General Historie of P /antes. Gathered by John Gerarde, 
of London, Master in Chirvrgerie. Very much enlarged and amended by 
Thomas Johnson, citizen and apothecarye of London. London, Printed by 
Adam Islip, Joke Norton, and Richard Whitakers. Anno 1 63 3. 

The proverb says that a door must be either open 
or shut. The bibliophile is apt to think that a book 
should be either little or big. For my own part, I 
become more and more attached to " dumpy 
twelves " ; but that does not preclude a certain 
discreet fondness for folios. If a man collects books, 
his library ought to contain a Herbal ; and if he has 
but room for one, that should be the best. The 
luxurious and sufficient thing, I think, is to possess 
what booksellers call " the right edition of Gerard " ; 
that is to say, the volume described at the head of 
this paper. There is no handsomer book to be found, 
none more stately or imposing, than this magnificent 
folio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elabo- 
rate letterpress, its innumerable plates, and John 
Payne's fine frontispiece in compartments, with 
Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another, 
and the author below them, holding in his right hand 
the new-found treasure of the potato plant. 

This edition of 1633 is the final development of 
what had been a slow growth. The sixteenth cen- 
tury witnessed a great revival, almost a creation of 
the science of botany. People began to translate 
e 2 51 



52 



Gossip in a Library 



the great Materia Medica of the Greek physician, 
Dioscorides of Anazarba, and to comment upon it. 
The Germans were the first to append woodcuts to 
their botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brun- 
felsius, in 1530, who has the credit of being the ori- 
ginator of such figures. In 1554 there was published 
the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus, 
body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II., who 
wrote in Dutch. An English translation of this, 
brought out in 1578, by Henry Lyte, was the earliest 
important Herbal in our language. Five years later, 
in 1583, a certain Dr. Priest translated all the 
botanical works of Dodonaeus, with much greater 
fulness than Lyte had done, and this volume was 
the germ of Gerard's far more famous production. 
John Gerard was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who 
came up to London, and practised there as a surgeon. 

According to his editor and continuator, Thomas 
Johnson, who speaks of Gerard with startling 
freedom, this excellent man was by no means 
well equipped for the task of compiling a great 
Herbal. He knew so little Latin, according to 
this too candid friend, that he imagined Leonard 
Fuchsius, who was a German contemporary of his 
own, to be one of the ancients. But Johnson is a 
little too zealous in magnifying his own office. He 
brings a worse accusation against Gerard, if I under- 
stand him rightly to charge him with using Dr. 
Priest's manuscript collections after his death, with- 
out giving that physician the credit of his labours. 
When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had 
been dead twenty-six years. In any case it seems 
certain that Gerard's original Herbal, which, beyond 



Gerard's Herbal 53 



question, surpassed all its predecessors when it was 
printed in folio in 1597, was built up upon the 
ground-work of Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. 
Nearly forty years later, Thomas Johnson, himself 
a celebrated botanist, took up the book, and spared 
no pains to reissue it in perfect form. The result is 
the great volume before us, an elephant among books, 
the noblest of all the English Herbals. Johnson was 
seventy-two years of age when he got this gigantic 
work off his hands, and he lived eleven years longer 
to enjoy his legitimate success. 

The great charm of this book at the present time 
consists in the copious woodcuts. Of these there 
are more than two thousand, each a careful and 
original study from the plant itself. In the course 
of two centuries and a half, with all the advance in 
appliances, we have not improved a whit on the 
original artist of Gerard's and Johnson's time. The 
drawings are all in strong outline, with very little 
attempt at shading, but the characteristics of each 
plant are given with a truth and a simplicity which 
are almost Japanese. In no case is this more extra- 
ordinary than in that of the orchids, or " satyrions," 
as they were called in the days of the old herbalist. 
Here, in a succession of little figures, each not more 
than six inches high, the peculiarity of every portion 
of a full-grown flowering specimen of each species 
is given with absolute perfection, without being 
slurred over on the one hand, or exaggerated on the 
other. For instance, the little variety called 
" ladies' tresses " [Sftiranthes], which throws a 
spiral head of pale green blossoms out of dry pastures, 
appears here with small bells hanging on a twisted 



54 



Gossip in a Library 



stem, as accurately as the best photograph could 
give it, although the process of woodcutting, as 
then practised in England, was very rude, and 
although almost all other English illustrations of 
the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain that 
in every instance the botanist himself drew the form, 
with which he was already intelligently familiar, on 
the block, with the living plant lying at his side. 

The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letter- 
press is methodical in the extreme. He begins by 
describing his plant, then gives its habitat, then 
discusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medical 
account of its nature and virtues. It is, of course, 
to be expected that we should find the fine old names 
of plants enshrined in Gerard's pages. For instance, 
he gives to the deadly nightshade the name, which 
now only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the 
" dwale." As an instance of his style, I may quote 
a passage from what he has to say about the virtues, 
or rather vices, of this plant : 

" Banish it from your gardens and the use of it 
also, being a plant so furious and deadly; for it 
bringeth such as have eaten thereof into a dead 
sleep wherein many have died, as hath been often 
seen and proved by experience both in England 
and elsewhere. But to give you an example hereof 
it shall not be amiss. It came to pass that three 
boys of Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the 
pleasant and beautiful fruit hereof, two whereof died 
in less than eight hours after they had eaten of them. 
The third child had a quantity of honey and water 
mixed together given him to drink, causing him to 
vomit often. God blessed this means, and the child 



Gerard's Herbal 55 



recovered. Banish, therefore, these pernicious plants 
out of your gardens, and all places near to your 
houses where children do resort/ ' 

Gerard has continually to stop his description that 
he may repeat to his readers some anecdote which 
he remembers. Now it is how " Master Cartwright, 
a gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was grievously 
wounded into the lungs," was cured with the herb 
called " Saracen's Compound," " and that, by 
God's permission, in short space." Now it is to tell 
us that he has found yellow archangel growing under 
a sequestered hedge " on the left hand as you go 
from the village of Hampstead, near London, to 
the church," or that " this amiable and pleasant 
kind of primrose " (a sort of oxlip) was first brought 
to light by Mr. Hesketh, " a diligent searcher after 
simples," in a Yorkshire wood. While the ground- 
lings were crowding to see new plays by Shirley and 
Massinger, the editor of this volume was examining 
fresh varieties of auricula in " the gardens of Mr. 
Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie." It is wonderful how 
modern the latter statement sounds, and how ancient 
the former. But the garden seems the one spot on 
earth where history does not assert itself, and, no 
doubt, when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of 
Rome, there were florists counting the petals of rival 
roses at Paestum as peacefully and conscientiously 
as any gardeners of to-day. 

The herbalist and his editor write from personal 
experience, and this gives them a great advantage 
in dealing with superstitions. If there was anything 
which people were certain about in the early part of 
the seventeenth century, it was that the mandrake 



56 



Gossip in a Library 



only grew under a gallows, where the dead body of 
a man had fallen to pieces, and that when it was dug 
up it gave a great shriek, which was fatal to the 
nearest living thing. Gerard contemptuously re- 
jects all these and other tales as " old wives' dreams/' 
He and his servants have often digged up man- 
drakes, and are not only still alive, but listened in 
vain for the dreadful scream. It might be supposed 
that such a statement, from so eminent an authority, 
would settle the point, but we find Sir Thomas 
Browne, in the next generation, battling these identi- 
cal popular errors in the pages of his Pseudodoxia 
Epidemica. In the like manner, Gerard's botanical 
evidence seems to have been of no use in persuading 
the public that mistletoe was not generated out of 
birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of 
trees, or that its berries were not desperately poison- 
ous. To observe and state the truth is not enough. 
The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be 
ready to accept it. 

Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through 
his sixteen hundred accurate and solemn pages with- 
out one slip. After accompanying him dutifully so 
far, we double up with uncontrollable laughter on 
p. 1587, for here begins the chapter which treats " of 
the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or the Tree bearing 
Geese." But even here the habit of genuine obser- 
vation clings to him. The picture represents a 
group of stalked barnacles — those shrimps fixed by 
their antennae, which modern science, I believe, calls 
Lepas anatifera ; by the side of these stands a little 
goose, and the suggestion of course is that the latter 
has slipped out of the former, although the draughts- 



Gerard's Herbal 



57 



man has been far too conscientious to represent the 
occurrence. Yet the letterpress is confident that 
in the north parts of Scotland there are trees on 
which grow white shells, which ripen, and then, 
opening, drop little living geese into the waves below. 
Gerard himself avers that from Guernsey and Jersey 
he brought home with him to London shells, like 
limpets, containing little feathery objects, " which, 
no doubt, were the fowls called Barnacles/ ' It is 
almost needless to say that these objects really were 
the plumose and flexible cirri which the barnacles 
throw out to catch their food with, and which lie, 
like a tiny feather-brush, just within the valves of 
the shell, when the creature is dead. Gerard was 
plainly unable to refuse credence to the mass of 
evidence which presented itself to him on this 
subject, yet he closes with a hint that this seems 
rather a " fabulous breed " of geese. 

With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper 
closes, in these quaint words : 

" And thus having, through God's assistance, dis- 
coursed somewhat at large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, 
trees and mosses, and certain excrescences of the 
earth, with other things moe, incident to the history 
thereof, we conclude, and end our present volume 
with this wonder of England. For the which God's 
name be ever honoured and praised." 

And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest 
sanction. 



PHARAMOND 



PHARAMOND 



Pharamond ; or, The History of France. A New Romance. In four parts. 
Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra and Cleopatra ; 
and now elegantly rendered into English. London : Printed by Ja : 
Cottrell, for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Boiv in Fleetstreet, near the Inner 
Temple-Gate. (Folio.) 1662. 

There is no better instance of the fact that books 
will not live by good works alone than is offered by 
the utterly neglected heroic novels of the seventeenth 
century. At the opening of the reign of Louis XIV. 
in France, several writers, in the general dearth of 
prose fiction, began to supply the public in Paris 
with a series of long romances, which for at least a 
generation absorbed the attention of the ladies and 
reigned unopposed in every boudoir. I wonder 
whether my lady readers have ever attempted to 
realise how their sisters of two hundred years ago 
spent their time ? In an English country-house of 
1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no 
lawn tennis or croquet, no afternoon-teas or glee- 
concerts, no mothers' meetings or zenana missions, 
no free social intercourse with neighbours, none of 
the thousand and one agreeable diversions with 
which the life of a modern girl is diversified. On the 
other hand, the ladies of the house had their needle- 
work to attend to, they had to " stitch in a clout," 
as it was called ; they had to attend to the duties of 
a housekeeper, and, when the sun shone, they tended 

61 



62 



Gossip in a Library 



the garden. Perhaps they rode or drove, in a 
stately fashion. But through long hours they sat 
over their embroidery frames or mended the solemn 
old tapestries which lined their walls, and during 
these sedate performances they required a long- 
winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might 
be read aloud by turns. The heroic novel, as pro- 
vided by Gombreville, Calprenede, and Mile, de 
Scudery supplied this want to perfection. 

The sentiments in these novels were of the most 
elevated class, and tedious as they seem nowadays 
to us, it was the sentiments, almost more than the 
action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. 
Madame de Sevigne herself, the brightest and 
wittiest of women, confessed herself to be a fly in 
the spider's web of their attractions. " The beauty 
of the sentiments/' she writes, " the violence of the 
passions, the grandeur of the events, and the 
miraculous success of their redoubtable swords, all 
draw me on as though I were still a little girl." In 
these modern days of success, we may still start to 
learn that the Parisian publisher of Le Grand Cyrus 
made 100,000 crowns by that work, from the appear- 
ance of its first volume in 1649 to i ts close in 1653. 
The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame 
de Sevigne were those which appealed most directly 
to public feeling in France. There really were heroes 
in that day, the age of chivalric passions had not 
passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of 
all kinds, were conceivable and within personal 
experience. When La Rochefoucauld wrote to 
Madame de Longueville the famous lines which may 
be thus translated : 



Pharamond 



63 



To win that wonder of the world, 
A smile from her bright eyes, 
I fought my King, and would have hurled 
The gods out of their skies, 

he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic 
novels. Their extraordinary artificial elevation of 
tone was partly the spirit of the age; it was also 
partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone of 
Greek romance. No book had been read in France 
with greater avidity than the sixteenth-century 
translation of the old novel Heliodorus ; and in the 
Polexandres and Clelies we see what this Greek spirit 
of romance could blossom into when grafted upon 
the stock of Louis XIV. 

The vogue of these heroic novels in England has 
been misstated, for the whole subject has but met 
with neglect from successive historians of literature. 
It has been asserted that they were not read in 
England until after the Restoration. Nothing is 
further from the truth. Charles I. read Cassandra 
in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne, in her 
exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously 
studying one heroic novel after another through the 
central years of Cromweirs rule. She reads Le 
Grand Cyrus while she has the ague; she desires 
Temple to tell her " which amant you have most 
compassion for, when you have read what each one 
says for himself/ ' She and the King read them in 
the original, but soon there arrived English transla- 
tions and imitations. These began to appear a good 
deal sooner than bibliographers have been prepared 
to admit. Of the Astree of D'Urfe — which, however, 
is properly a link between the Arcadia of Sidney and 



6 4 



Gossip in a Library 



the genuine heroic novel — there was an English 
version as early as 1620. But, of the real thing, the 
first importation was Polexandre, in 1647, followed 
by Cassandra and Ibrahim in 1652, Artamenes in 
1653, Cleopatra in 1654-8, and Clelie in 1655, all, it 
will be observed, published in England before the 
close of the Commonwealth. 

Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French 
originals, turned up her nose at these translations. 
She says that they were " so disguised that I, who 
am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them." 
They had, moreover, changed their form. In 
France they had come out in an infinite number of 
small, manageable tomes. For instance, Calprenede 
published his Cleopatre in twenty- three volumes; 
but the English Cleopatra is all contained in one 
monstrous elephant folio. Artamenes, the English 
translation of Le Grand Cyrus, is worse still, for it is 
comprised in five such folios. Many of the originals 
were translated over and over again, so popular 
were they ; and as the heroic novels of any eminence 
in France were limited in number, it would be easy, 
by patiently hunting the translations up in old 
libraries, to make a pretty complete list of them. 
The principal heroic novels were eight in all; of 
these there is but one, the Almahide of Mile, de 
Scudery, which we have not already mentioned, 
and the original publication of the whole school is 
confined within less than thirty years. 

The best master in a bad class of lumbering and 
tiresome fiction was the author of the book which 
is the text of this chapter. La Calprenede, whose 
full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes 



Pharamond 



65 



de la Calprenede, was a Gascon gentleman of the 
Guards, of whose personal history the most notorious 
fact is that he had the temerity to marry a woman 
who had already buried five husbands. Some his- 
torians relate that she proceeded to poison number 
six, but this does not appear to be certain, while it 
does appear that Calprenede lived in the married 
state for fifteen years, a longer respite than the 
antecedents of madame gave him any right to anti- 
cipate. He made a great fame with his two huge 
Roman novels, Cassandra and Cleopatra, and then, 
some years later, he produced a third, Pharamond, 
which was taken out of early French history. The 
translator, in the version before us, says of this book 
that it "is not a romance, but a history adorned 
with some excellent flourishes of language and loves, 
in which you may delightfully trace the author's 
learned pen through all those historians who wrote 
of the times he treats of." In other words, while 
Gombreville — with his King of the Canaries, and 
his Vanishing Islands, and his necromancers, and 
his dragons — canters through pure fairyland, and 
while Mile, de Scudery elaborately builds up a 
romantic picture of her own times (in Clelie, for 
instance, where the three hundred and seventy 
several characters introduced are said to be all 
acquaintances of the author), Calprenede attempted 
to produce something like a proper historical novel, 
introducing invention, but embroidering it upon 
some sort of genuine framework of fact. 

To describe the plot of Pharamond, or of any 
other heroic novel, would be a desperate task. The 
great number of personages introduced in pairs, 



66 Gossip in a Library 



the intrigues of each couple forming a separate 
thread wound into the complex web of the plot, is 
alone enough to make any following of the story a 
great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copy of Cleo- 
patra which lies before me, some dear lady of the 
seventeenth century has very conscientiously written 
out " a list of the Pairs of Lovers/' and there are 
thirteen pairs. Pharamond begins almost in the r 
same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G. P. R. 
James might. When the book opens we discover 
the amorous Marcomine and the valiant Genebaud 
sallying forth along the bank of a river on two 
beautiful horses of the best jennet-race. Through- 
out the book all the men are valiant, all the ladies 
are passionate and chaste. The heroes enter the 
lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over 
surcoats of gold and silk tissue; their heads " shine 
with gold, enamel and precious stones, with the 
hinder part covered with an hundred plumes of 
different colours." They are mounted upon horses 
" whose whiteness might outvie the purest snow 
upon the frozen Alps." They pierce into woodland 
dells, where they by chance discover renowned prin- 
cesses, nonpareils of beauty, in imminent danger, 
and release them. They attack hordes of deadly 
pirates, and scatter their bodies along the shore; 
and yet, for all their warlike fire and force, they are 
as gentle as marmozets in a lady's boudoir. They 
are especially admirable in the putting forth of 
sentiments, in glozing over a subtle difficulty in love, 
in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock of hair to 
their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so 
softly that a lady who is seated there, in a reverie, 



Pharamond 



6 7 



will not perceive them ; they are so adroit that they 
will seize a paper on which she has sketched a 
couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not 
know whence the poetical miracle has come. In 
valour, in courtesy, in magnificence they have no 
rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique 
in beauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. 
Sometimes they correspond at immense length; in 
Pharamond the letters which pass between the 
Princess Hunnimonde and Prince Balamir would 
form a small volume by themselves, an easy intro- 
duction to the art of polite letter-writing. Mile, de 
Scudery actually perceived this, and published a 
collection of model correspondence which was culled 
bodily from the huge store-house of her own ro- 
mances, from Le Grand Cyrus and Clelie. These 
interchanges of letters were kept up by the severity 
of the heroines. It was not thought proper that the 
lady should yield her hand until the gentleman had 
exhausted the resources of language, and had spent 
years of amorous labour on her conquest. When 
Roger Boyle, in 1654, published his novel of Par- 
thenissa, in four volumes, Dorothy Osborne objected 
to the ease with which the hero succeeded; she 
complains " the ladies are all so kind they make no 
sport." 

This particular 1662 translation of Pharamond 
appears to be very rare, if not unique. At all 
events I find it in none of the bibliographies, nor 
has the British Museum Library a copy of it. The 
preface is signed J. D., and the version is probably 
therefore from the pen of John Davies, who helped 
Loveday to finish his enormous translation of 



68 



Gossip in a Library 



Cleopatra in 1665. In 1677 there came out another 
version of Pharamond, by John Phillips, and this is 
common enough. Some day, perhaps, these elephant- 
ine old romances may come into fashion again, and 
we may obtain a precise list of them. At present 
no corner of our literary history is more thoroughly 
neglected. 1 

1 Since this was written, a French critic of eminence, 
M. Jusserand, has made (in The English Novel in the Time 
of Shakespeare, 1890) a delightful contribution to this 
portion of our literary history. The earlier part of the last 
chapter of that volume may be recommended to all readers 
curious about the vogue of the heroic novel. But M. 
Jusserand does not happen to mention Pharamond, nor to 
cover the exact ground of my little study. 



VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS 



k VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS 



In his Ballad of the Book-Hunter, Andrew Lang 
describes how, in breeches baggy at the knees, the 
bibliophile hunts in all weathers : 

No dismal stall escapes his eye ; 

He turns o'er tomes of low degrees ; 
There soiled romanticists may lie, 

Or Restoration comedies. 

That speaks straight to my heart; for of all my 
weaknesses the weakest is that weakness of mine 
for Restoration plays. From 1660 down to 1710 
nothing in dramatic form comes amiss, and I have 
great schemes, like the boards on which people play 
the game of solitaire, in which space is left for every 
drama needed to make this portion of my library 
complete. It is scarcely literature, I confess ; it is 
a sport, a long game which I shall probably be still 
playing at, with three mouldy old tragedies and one 
opera yet needed to complete my set, when the 
Reaper comes to carry me where there is no amassing 
nor collecting. It would hardly be credited how 
much pleasure I have drained out of these dramas 
since I began to collect them judiciously in my still 
callow youth. I admit only first editions ; but that 
is not so rigorous as it sounds, since at least half of 
the poor old things never went into a second. 
As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, 

71 



7 2 



Gossip in a Library 



of course it is literature, and of a very high order ; 
even Shadwell and Mrs. Behn and Southerne are 
literature ; Settle and Ravenscroft may pass as legit- 
imate literary curiosity. But there are depths belo^v 
this where there is no excuse but sheer collectaneo- 
mania. Plays by people who never got into any 
schedule of English letters that ever was planned, 
dramatic nonentities, stage innocents massacred in 
their cradles, if only they were published in quarto I 
find room for them. I am not quite so pleased to 
get these anonymities, I must confess, as I air. to 
get a clean, tall editio princeps of The Orphan n of 
Love for Love. But I neither reject nor despise 
them; each of them counts one; each serves to 
fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurries on 
that dreadful possible time coming when my collec- 
tion shall be complete, and I shall have nothing to 
do but break my collecting rod and bury it fathoms 
deep. 

A volume has just come in which happens to have 
nothing in it but those forgotten plays, whose very 
names are unknown to the historians of literature. 
First comes The Roman Empress, by William Joyner, 
printed in 1671. Joyner was an Oxford man, a 
fellow of Magdalen College. The little that has been 
recorded about him makes one wish to know more. 
He became persuaded of the truth of the Catholic 
faith, and made a voluntary resignation of his 
Oxford fellowship. He had to do something, and 
so he wrote this tragedy, which he dedicated to Sir 
Charles Sedley, the poet, and got acted at the 
Theatre Royal. The cast contains two good actors' 
names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it seems that it 



A Volume of Old Plays 73 



enjoyed a considerable success. But doubtless the 
stage was too rough a field for the gentle Oxford 
scholar. He retired into a sequestered country 
village, where he lingered on till 1706, when he was 
nearly ninety. But Joyner was none of the worst of 
poets. Here is a fragment of The Royal Empress, 
which is by no means despicably versed : 

O thou bright, glorious morning, 
Thou Oriental spring-time of the day, 
Who with thy mixed vermilion colours faintest 
The sky, these hills and plains ! thou dost return 
In thy accustomed manner, but with thee 
Shall ne'er return my wonted happiness. 

Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive 
vein of sadness, as though the poet were thinking 
less of his Aurelia and his Valentius than of the lost 
common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no 
more revisited. 

Our next play is a worse one, but much more 
pretentious. It is the Usurper, of 1668, the first 
of four dramas published by the Hon. Edward 
Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in- 
law. Edward Howard is memorable for a couplet 
constantly quoted from his epic poem of The British 
Princes : 

A vest as admired Vortiger had on, 

Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won. 

Poor Howard has received the laughter of genera- 
tions for representing Vortiger's grandsire as thus 
having stripped one who was bare already. But 
this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps 
of Dryden himself, who loved to laugh at his brother- 



74 



Gossip in a Library 



in-law. At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) 
edition of The British Princes is before me at this 
moment, and the second of these lines certainly 
runs : 

Which from this island's foes his grandsire won. 

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like 
so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this 
case for a couple of centuries. The Usurper is a 
tragedy, in which a Parasite, " a most perfidious 
villain/ ' plays a mysterious part. He is led off to 
be hanged at last, much to the reader's satisfaction, 
who murmurs, in the words of R. L. Stevenson, 
" There's an end of that." 

But though the Usurper is dull, we reach a lower 
depth and muddier lees of wit in the Carnival, a 
comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664. It is 
odd, however, that the very worst production, if it 
be more than two hundred years old, is sure to 
contain some little thing interesting to a modern 
student. The Carnival has one such peculiarity. 
Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the 
stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's 
Churchyard Elegy. This is a very quaint innovation, 
and one which possibly occurred to brave Major 
Porter in one of the marches and counter-marches of 
the Civil War. 

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, 
and the fourth play in our volume really repays us 
for pushing on so far. Here is a piece of wild and 
ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the 
Duke of Newcastle's Humorous Lovers : 



A Volume of Old Plays 75 



At cur few- time, and at the dead of night, 

I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright, 

Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow 

To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo 

To darker caves and solitary woods, 

To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods ; 

Pll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe, 

Blasted with cursed droppings of mildew ; 

Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans 

Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans ; 

The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, 

And how thy want of love did murder me ; 

And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near, 

Then in a flash of fire Pll disappear. 

But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of 
Newcastle wrote those lines himself. Published in 
1677, they were as much of a portent as a man in 
trunk hose and a slashed doublet. The Duke had 
died a month or two before the play was published ; 
he had grown to be, in extreme old age, the most 
venerable figure of the Restoration, and it is possible 
that the Humorous Lovers may have been a relic of 
his Jacobean youth. He might very well have 
written it, so old was he, in Shakespeare's lifetime. 
But the Duke of Newcastle was never a very skilful 
poet, and it is known that he paid James Shirley 
to help him with his plays. I feel convinced that 
if all men had their own, the invocation I have just 
quoted would fly back into the works of Shirley, and 
so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit of 
conceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast 
which Boldman promises to the Widow of his heart : 

The twinkling stars shall to our wish 
Make a grand salad in a dish ; 



7 6 



Gossip in a Library 



Snow for our sugar shall not fail, 
Fine candied ice, comfits of hail; 
For oranges, gilt clouds we'll squeeze ; 
The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese ; 
Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place 
Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace ; 
Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet, 
And violet skies strewed for our feet; 
The spheres shall for our music "play, 
While spirits dance the time away. 

This is extravagant enough, but surely very pictur- 
esque. I seem to see the supper-room of some 
Elizabethan castle after an elaborate royal masque. 
The Duchess, who has been dancing, richly attired 
in sky-coloured silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, 
is attended to the refreshments by the florid Duke, 
personating the river Thamesis, with a robe of cloth 
of silver around him. It seems the sort of thing a 
poet so habited might be expected to say between a 
galliard and a coranto. 

At first sight we seem to have reached a really 
good rhetorical play when we arrive at Bancroft's 
tragedy of Sertorius, published in 1679, an d so 
would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. 
But its seeming excellence is greatly lessened when 
we recollect that All for Love and Mithridates, two 
great poems which are almost good plays, appeared 
in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft. 
Sertorius is written in smooth and well-sustained 
blank verse, which is, however, nowhere quite good 
enough to be quoted. I suspect that John Bancroft 
was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and 
his practice lay particularly in the theatrical and 
literary world. He acquired, it is said, from his 



A Volume of Old Plays 77 



patients " a passion for the Muses," and an inclina- 
tion to follow in the steps of those whom he cured or 
killed. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epi- 
logue to Sertorius, in which he says that — 

Our Poet to learned critics does submit, 
But scorns those little vermin of the fit, 
Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit, 

and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional 
than those of the professional playwrights them- 
selves. He wrote three plays, and lived until 1696. 
One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, 
laden with his secrets and his confidences. Why did 
he not write memoirs, and tell us what it was that 
drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway really died, and 
what Dryden's habits were ? Why did he not purvey 
magnificent indiscretions whispered under the great 
periwig of Wycherley, or repeat that splendid story 
about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave ? Alas ! 
we would have given a wilderness of Sertoriuses for 
such a series of memoirs. 

The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is 
Weston's Amazon Queen, of 1667, written in pompous 
rhymed heroics; here is The Fortune Hunters, a 
comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, 
James Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, pre- 
ferred "to be rather than to personate a hero/' and 
died in gallant fight for William of Orange, at the 
battle of Aughrim; here is Mr. Anthony, a comedy 
written by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, 
and printed in 1690, a piece never republished 
among the Earl's works, and therefore of some 
special interest. But I am sure my reader is ex- 



7« 



hausted, even if the volume is not, and I spare him 
any further examination of these obscure dramas, 
lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr. 
Johnson, that I 

Set wheels on wheels in motion — such a clatter ! 
To force up one poor nipperkin of water ; 
Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar 
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore. 

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the 
special student of comparative literature — namely, 
that it is sometimes in the minor writings of an 
age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly 
felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most 
clearly observed. The Amazon Queen is in rhymed 
verse, because in 1667 this was the fashionable form 
for dramatic poetry; Sertorius is in regular and 
somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 
the fashion had once more chopped round. What 
in Dryden or Otway might be the force of originality 
may be safely taken as the drift of the age in these 
imitative and floating nonentities. 



CENSOR OF POETS 



A CENSOR OF POETS 

The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, or the Honour of 
Parnassus ; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above Tzuo 
Hundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to the 
Reign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by William 
Winstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, for 
Samuel Manship at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil, 1687. 

A maxim which it would be well for ambitious 
critics to chalk up on the walls of their workshops 
is this : never mind whom you praise, but be very 
careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations 
have struck on the reef of some poet or novelist 
whom the great censor, in his proud old age, has 
thought he might disdain with impunity. Who 
recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, 
acute, learned, sympathetic ? To us he is merely 
the sore old bear, who was too stupid to perceive 
the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination 
lavished by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, 
weigh like a feather beside one sentence about 
Wordsworth's Excursion, and one tasteless sneer at 
Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte- 
Beuve totters at the whisper of the name Balzac. 
Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser to 
have taken counsel with himself before he laughed 
at Shelley. And the very unimportant but sincere 
and interesting writer, whose book occupies us to- 
day, is in some respects the crowning instance of 
the rule. His literary existence has been sacrificed 



82 



Gossip in a Library 



by a single outburst of petulant criticism, which 
was not even literary, but purely political. 

The only passage of Winstanley's Lives of the 
English Poets which is ever quoted is the paragraph 
which refers to Milton, who, when it appeared, had 
been dead thirteen years. It runs thus : 

" John Milton was one whose natural parts might 
deservedly give him a place amongst the principal 
of our English Poets, having written two Heroick 
Poems and a Tragedy, namely Paradice Lost, 
Paradice Regain d, and Sampson Agonista. But 
his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and 
his Memory will always stink, which might have 
ever lived in honourable Repute, had not he been a 
notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villan- 
ously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the 
First." 

Mr. Winstanley does not leave us in any doubt of 
his own political bias, and his mode is simply 
infamous. It is the roughest and most unpardon- 
able expression now extant of the prejudice generally 
felt against Milton in London, after the Restoration 
— a prejudice which even Dryden, who in his heart 
knew better, could not wholly resist. This one 
sentence is all that most readers of seventeenth- 
century literature know about Winstanley, and it 
is not surprising that it has created an objection to 
him. I forget who it was, among the critics of the 
beginning of this century, who was accustomed to 
buy copies of the Lives of the English Poets wherever 
he could pick them up, and burn them, in piety 
to the angry spirit of Milton. This was certainly 
more sensible conduct than that of the Italian 



A Censor of Poets 83 



nobleman, who used to build MSS. of Martial into 
little pyres, and consume them with spices, to 
express his admiration of Catullus. But no one 
can wonder that the world has not forgiven Win- 
stanley for that atrocious phrase about Milton's 
fame having " gone out like a candle in a snuff, so 
that his memory will always stink." No, Mr. 
William Winstanley, it is your own name that — 
smells so very unpleasantly. 

Yet I am paradoxical enough to believe that poor 
Winstanley never wrote these sentences which have 
destroyed his fame. To support my theory, it is 
needful to recount the very scanty knowledge we 
possess of his life. He is said to have been a barber, 
and to have risen by his exertions with the razor; 
but, against that legend, is to be posed the fact that 
on the titles of his earliest books, dedicated to public 
men who must have known, he styles himself 
" Gent." The dates of his birth and death are, I 
believe, a matter of conjecture. But the Lives of the 
English Poets is the latest of his books, and the 
earliest was published in 1660. This is his England's 
Worthies, a group of what we should call to-day 
" biographical studies." The longest and the most 
interesting of these is one on Oliver Cromwell, the 
tone of which is almost grossly laudatory, although 
published at the very moment of Restoration. 
Now, it is a curious, and, at first sight, a very dis- 
graceful fact, that in 1684, when the book of Eng- 
land's Worthies was re-issued, all the praise of re- 
publicans was cancelled, and abuse substituted for 
it. And then, in 1687, came the Lives of the English 
Poets, with its horrible attack on Milton. The 



8 4 



Gossip in a Library 



character of Winstanley seems to be as base as any 
on literary record. I have come to the conclusion, 
however, that Winstanley was guilty, neither of 
retracting what he said about Cromwell, nor of 
slandering Milton. The black woman excused her 
husband for not answering the bell, " 'Cause he's 
dead," and the excuse was considered valid. I 
hope that when these interpolations were made, 
poor Winstanley was dead. 

Any one who reads the Lives of the English Poets 
carefully, will be impressed with two facts : first, 
that the author had an acquaintance with the early 
versifiers of Great Britain, which was quite extra- 
ordinary, and which can hardly be found at fault 
by our modern knowledge; while, secondly, that 
he shows a sudden and unaccountable ignorance of 
his immediate contemporaries of the younger school. 
Except Campion, who is a discovery of our own day, 
not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean rhymester of 
the second or third rank escapes his notice. Among 
the writers of a still later generation, I miss no 
names save those of Vaughan, who was very obscure 
in his own lifetime, and Marvell, who would be 
excluded by the same prejudice which mocked at 
Milton. But among Poets of the Restoration, men 
and women who were in their full fame in 1687, the 
omissions are quite startling. Not a word is here 
about Otway, Lee, or Crowne ; Butler is not men- 
tioned, nor the Matchless Orinda, nor Roscommon, 
nor Sir Charles Sedley. A careful examination of 
the dates of works which Winstanley refers to, 
produces a curious result. There is not mentioned, 



A Censor of Poets 85 



so far as I can trace, a single poem or play which 
was published later than 1675, although the date 
on the title-page of the Lives of the English Poets 
is 1687. Rather an elaborate list of Dryden's 
publications is given, but it stops at Amboyna (1673). 
On this I think it is not too bold to build a theory, 
which may last until Winstanley's entry of burial is 
discovered in some country church, that he died 
soon after 1675. If this were the case, the recanta- 
tions in his English Worthies of 1684 would be so 
many posthumous outrages committed on his blame- 
less tomb, and the infamous sentence about Milton 
may well have been foisted into a posthumous 
volume by the same wicked hand. If we could 
think that Samuel Manship, at the Sign of the Black 
Bull, was the obsequious rogue who did it, that would 
be one more sin to be numbered against the sad 
race of publishers. 

In studying old books about the poets, it some- 
times occurs to us to wonder whether the readers of 
two hundred years ago appreciated the same 
qualities in good verse which are now admired. 
Did the ringing and romantic cadences of Shakes- 
peare affect their senses as they do ours ? We know 
that they praised Carew and Suckling, but was it 
" Ask me no more where June bestows," and " Hast 
thou seen the down in the air/ 7 which gave them 
pleasure ? It would sometimes seem, from the 
phrases they use and the passages they quote, that 
if poetry was the same two centuries ago, its readers 
had very different ears from ours. Of Herrick 
Winstanley says that he was " one of the Scholars 



86 Gossip in a Library 



of Apollo of the middle Form, yet something above 
George Withers, in a pretty Flowry and Pastoral 
Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, 
Cave, Rock, or Fountain ; which but for the interrup- 
tion of other trivial Passages, might have made up 
none of the worst Poetick Landskips," and then he 
quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome " epi- 
gram," in the poet's worst style. This is not 
delicate or acute criticism, as we judge nowadays; 
but I would give a good deal to meet Winstanley 
at a coffee-house, and go through the Hesperides 
with him over a dish of chocolate. It would be 
wonderfully interesting to discover which passages 
in Herrick really struck the contemporary mind 
as " flowery/' and which as " trivial/' But this 
is just what all seventeenth-century criticism, even 
Dry den's, omits to explain to us. The personal 
note in poetical criticism, the appeal to definite 
taste, to the experience of eye and ear, is not met 
with, even in suggestion, until we reach the pamph- 
lets of John Dennis. 

The particular copy of Winstanley which lies 
before me is a valuable one ; I owe it to the generosity 
of a friend in Chicago, who hoards rare books, and 
yet has the greatness of soul sometimes to part 
with them. It is interleaved, and the blank pages 
are rather densely inscribed with notes in the hand- 
writing of Dr. Thomas Percy, the poetical Bishop 
of Dromore. From his hands it passed into those 
of John Bowyer Nichols, the antiquary. Percy's 
notes are little more than references to other 
authorities, memoranda for one of his own useful 



A Censor of Poets 



compilations, yet it is pleasant to have even a slight 
personal relic of so admirable a man. Mr. Riviere 
has bound the volume for me, and I suppose that 
poor rejected Winstanley exists nowhere else in so 
elegant a shape. 



THE ROMANCE OF A 
DICTIONARY 



J — * 



THE ROMANCE OF A 
DICTIONARY 

Histoire de L'Academie Francoise : avec un Abrege des Vies du Cardinal 
de Richelieu, Vaugelas, Corneille, Ablancourt, Mezerai, Voiture, Patru, la 
Fontaine, Boileau, Racine Et autres Illustres Academiciens qui la Component* 

A La Haye, MDCLXXXVUI. 

It is not often, in these days, when the pastime of 
bibliography is reduced to a science, that one is 
rewarded, as one so often was a quarter of a century 
ago, by picking up an unregarded treasure on the 
bookstalls. But the other day I really had a 
pleasant little " find," and it was the reward of 
virtue. It came of having a tender heart. My eye 
caught what Mr. Austin Dobson would call " a dear 
and dumpy twelve," lying open upon other books, 
face downward, in the most ignominious posture. 
I saw at a glance, from the tooling on its faded and 
half-broken back, that it was French and of the 
seventeenth century, and that somebody had prized 
it once. I could read the lettering Academ. Franc, 
and I gave the pence which were wanted for it. 
It proved a most rewarding little volume. It was 
published at The Hague in 1688, and it was a new 
edition of the Histoire de VAcademie Franqaise. 
A preface says that " for the honour of our nation " 
(the French, presumably, not the Dutch), the 
publisher has thought it proper to issue an edition 

91 



92 Gossip in a Library 



" more correct and more elegant " than has hitherto 
been seen, brought down to date with many new 
and curious pieces. Among other things, the said 
publisher thinks that " the English will not be dis- 
pleased to see the Panegyric " of King Louis XIV. 
" admirably rendered in their language by a Person 
of their Nation." But what immediately caught 
my attention, and filled me with delight, was an 
absolutely contemporary account, written specially 
for this 1688 edition, of the great quarrel between the 
French Academy and the Abbe Furetiere. Of this 
I propose to speak to-day. 

We live in an age of Dictionaries and Encyclo- 
pedias, which we look upon as universal panaceas 
for culture. There was a similar rage for dictionaries 
in France two hundred and fifty years ago. We may 
very rapidly remind ourselves that the French 
Academy was constituted in 1634 with thirty-five 
members, who became the stationary and immortal 
Forty in 1639. One of its original functions was 
the preparation of a great Dictionary of the French 
language, under the special care of the eminent 
grammarian, Vaugelas, who had through his life- 
time made collections — " various beautiful and 
curious observations," as Pellisson calls them — • 
towards a reasoned philological study of French. 
The poet Chapelain was appointed a sort of general 
editor of the projected Dictionary, which was 
solemnly started early in 1638. For the next four 
years the Academicians were very active, spurred 
on by Richelieu, but when, in 1642, the Cardinal 
died, their zeal relented, and when, in 1650, Vauge- 
las 's presence ceased to urge them forward, it flagged 



The Romance of a Dictionary 93 



altogether. Vaugelas died bankrupt, and his 
creditors seized his writing-desks, the drawers of 
which contained a great part of the MS. collections 
for the Dictionary. It was only after a lawsuit 
that the Academy recovered those papers, and 
Mezeray was then set to continue the editing of 
the work. Still twice a week the Academy met to 
consult about the Dictionary, but so languidly and 
with so little fire, that Boisrobert said that not the 
youngest of the Forty could hope to live to print 
the letter G. As a matter of fact, not one of those 
who started the Dictionary lived to see it published. 

In this slow fashion, with long Rip Van Winkle 
slumbers and occasional faint awakenings, the 
French Academy faltered on with fitful persistence 
towards the completion of its famous Dictionary. 
But, as I have said, it was a period of great enthu- 
siasm about all such summaries of knowledge, and 
Paris was thirsting for grammars, lexicons, inven- 
tories of language and the like. The Academy 
insisted that the world must wait for the approach 
of their vast and lumbering machine; but mean- 
while public curiosity was impatient, and all sorts 
of brief and imperfect dictionaries were issued to 
satisfy it. The publication of these spurious guides 
to knowledge infuriated the Academy, until in 
1674 the dog permanently occupied the manger by 
inducing the King to issue a decree " forbidding all 
printers and publishers to print any new dictionary 
of the French language, under any title whatsoever, 
until the publication of that of the French Academy, 
or until twenty years have expired since the pro- 
clamation of the present decree," This cut the 



94 



Gossip in a Library 



ground from under the feet of all rivals, and the 
Academy could meet twice a week as before and 
mumble its definitions with serene assurance. From 
this false security it was roused by the incident 
which my " dumpy twelve " recounts. 

It was from the very heart of their own body that 
the great attack upon their privileges unexpectedly 
fell upon the Academicians. In 1662 they had 
elected (in the place of De Boissat, a very obscure 
original member) the Abbe of Chalivoy, Antoine 
Furetiere. This man, born in Paris of poor parents 
in 1619, had raised himself to eminence as an 
Orientalist and grammarian, and was welcomed 
among the Forty as likely to be particularly helpful 
to them in their Dictionary work. He was probably 
one of those men whose true character does not 
come out until they attain success. But no sooner 
was Furetiere an Immortal than he began to dis- 
tinguish himself in unanticipated ways. He proved 
himself an adept in parody and satire, and so long 
as he contented himself with laughing at people like 
Charles Sorel, the author of Francion, who had no 
friends, the Academicians were calm and amused. 
But Furetiere was not merely the author of that 
extremely amusing medley, Le Roman Bourgeois 
(1666), which still holds its place in French literature 
as a minor classic, but he was also a real student of 
philology, and one of those who most ardently 
desired to see the settlement of the canon of French 
language. It incensed him beyond words that his 
colleagues dawdled so endlessly over their com- 
mittees and their definitions. He began to make 
collections of his own, no doubt at first with the 



The Romance of a Dictionary 95 



perfectly loyal intention of adding them to the 
common store. Meanwhile he lashed the rest of 
the Academy with his tongue. Other Academicians 
did this also, such men as Patru and Boisrobert, but 
they had not Furetiere's nasty way of putting things. 
One perceives that about the year 1680 the sarcasms 
of Furetiere had really become something more than 
the rest of the Immortals could put up with. 

He delivered himself into their hands, and here 
my little volume takes up the tale. On the 3rd 
of January, 1685, the French Academy met to 
mourn the death of its most illustrious member, 
the great Pierre Corneille, and to elect his younger 
brother to take his place. While the members were 
chatting together their Librarian handed about 
among them copies of a " privilege " which had 
just been obtained by the Abbe Furetiere to publish 
" a universal Dictionary containing generally all 
French words, old as well as modern, and the terms 
employed in all arts and sciences/ ' So declares my 
little book; but it would seem that the officers of 
the Academy at least a week earlier had their 
attention drawn to what Furetiere was doing. 
Perhaps it was not until the election of Thomas 
Corneille that an opportunity occurred of making 
the members generally aware of it. One wonders 
whether Furetiere himself was present on the 3rd 
of January ; if so, what puttings of periwigs together 
there must have been in corners, and what taps of 
gold-headed canes on lace-frilled cuffs ! It was 
felt, as my little volume puts it, that " Monsieur the 
Abbe Furetiere, being one of the Forty Academicians, 
ought not to have been privately busying himself 



Gossip in a Library 



on a work which he knew to be the principal occupa- 
tion of the whole Academy/' It is surprising, in 
the face of the monopoly which that body had 
secured, that Furetiere was able to obtain a Privilege 
for his own Dictionary, but in all probability, as 
he was one of the Forty, the censors supposed that 
he was acting in concert with his colleagues. 

Then began a hue and cry with which the learned 
world of Paris rang for months. Never was such 
a scandal, never such a rain of pamphlets and 
lampoons on one side and the other. One has only 
to glance at the contemporary portraits of Furetiere 
to see that he was not the man to yield a point ; his 
wrinkled face looks the very mirror of sarcastic 
obstinacy and brilliant ill-nature. The Academy, 
in solemn session, appointed Regnier Desmarais, 
their secretary, to wait on the Chancellor to demand 
the cancelling of Furetiere's privilege. But the 
Abbe had powerful friends also, and by their help 
the Chancellor's action was delayed, while Furetiere 
hurried out a specimen of his work. He says in the 
preface that no author ever had a more pressing need 
for the protection of a prince than he has who sees 
the labour of years about to be sacrificed to the envy 
of others. He goes on to explain that he has never 
dreamed of interfering with the work of the Academy, 
for which he has the greatest possible respect, but 
that he only hopes to render service to the public 
by supplementing its labours. The Academy, in 
fact, had expressly declined to include in its Diction- 
ary the technical terms of art and science, and it is 
particularly with these that Furetiere is occupied. 
His answer to those who accuse him of stealing 



The Romance of a Dictionary 97 



from the unpublished cahiers of the Academy is the 
uniformity of his work from A to Z; whereas, if 
he had stolen from his colleagues, he must have 
stopped at O-P, which was the point they had 
reached in 1684. 

The Academy was not pacified, and began to take 
counsel how they could turn Furetiere out of their 
body. There was no precedent for such a degrada- 
tion, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that 
the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its 
most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit 
went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One. Furetiere 
is said to have bowed for a moment beneath the 
storm, offering to blend his work in the general 
Dictionary of the Academy, or to remove from it all 
words not admitted to deal technically with art and 
science. But passion had gone too far, and on the 
22nd of January, 1685, at a general meeting, twenty 
Academicians being present, Furetiere was expelled 
from the body by a majority of nineteen to one. It 
is believed that the one who voted for mercy was 
the most illustrious of all, Racine. Boileau and 
Bossuet also defended the Abbe, and when the matter 
became at last so serious that the King himself was 
obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood 
that his sympathies also were with Furetiere. 

My little volume (written, I think, in 1687) does 
not know anything about the expulsion, which was 
therefore probably secret. It says : "As to Mon- 
sieur Furetiere, he no longer puts in an appearance 
at the meetings of the Academy, but it is not known 
whether any other Academician is to be elected in his 
place." As a matter of fact, the society hesitated 

H 



Gossip in a Library 



to go so far as this, and the seat was left vacant. 
Not for long, however ; the unanimous rancour of so 
many men of influence and rank had successfully 
ruined the fortune and broken the spirit of the old 
piratical lexicographer. Before retiring into private 
life, however, he poured out in his Couches de 
V Academic a torrent of poison, which was distilled 
through the presses of Amsterdam in 1687. One of 
his earlier colleagues at the Academy supplied the 
bankrupt man with the necessaries of life, until, 
on the 14th of May, 1688, probably just as the 
" dumpy twelve " was passing through the press, 
he died in Paris like a rat in a hole. His Dictionary, 
being suppressed in France, was edited, after his 
death, in 1690, at The Hague and Rotterdam, and 
enjoyed a great success. We learn from a letter of 
Racine to Boileau that in 1694 the publisher ventured 
to offer a copy of a new edition of it to the King of 
France, and that it was graciously received. If 
the poor old man could have struggled on a little 
longer he might have lived to see himself become 
fashionable and successful again. 

With all his misfortunes he managed to beat the 
Academy, for that body, in spite of its superhuman 
efforts, did not contrive to publish its Dictionary till 
four years after the appearance of Furetiere's. The 
latter is a great curiosity of lexicography, a vast 
storehouse of peculiar and rare information. It is 
always consulted by scholars, but never without a 
recollection of the extraordinary struggle which 
its author sustained, singlehanded, against the world, 
and in which he fell, overpowered by numbers, only 
to triumph after all in the ashes of his fame. 



LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS 



H 2 



LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS 



Miscellany Poems. With Tzuo Plays. By Ardelia. 

I never list presume to Parnass hill, 

But piping low, in shade of loivly grove, 

I play to please myself albeit ill. 

Spencer Shep. Cal. June. 

Manuscript in folio. Circa 1696. 

There is no other book in my library to which I feel 
that I possess so clear a presumptive right as to this 
manuscript. Other rare volumes would more fitly 
adorn the collections of bibliophiles more learned, 
more ingenious, more elegant, than I. But if there 
is any person in the two hemispheres who has so fair 
a claim upon the ghost of Ardelia, let that man stand 
forth. Ardelia was uncultivated and unsung when 
I constituted myself, years ago, her champion. 
With the exception of a noble fragment of laudation 
from Wordsworth, no discriminating praise from any 
modern critic had stirred the ashes of her name. I 
made it my business to insist in many places on the 
talent of Ardelia. I gave her, for the first time, a 
chance of challenging public taste, by presenting to 
readers of Mr. Ward's English Poets many pages of 
extracts from her writings ; and I hope it is not 
indiscreet to say that, when the third volume of that 
compilation appeared, Mr. Matthew Arnold told 
me that its greatest revelation to himself had been 
the singular merit of this lady. Such being my claim 
on the consideration of Ardelia, no one will, I think, 

IOI 



102 



Gossip in a Library 



grudge me the possession of this unknown volume 
of her works in manuscript. It came into my hands 
by a strange coincidence. In his brief life of Anne 
Finch, Countess of Winchilsea — for that was 
Ardelia's real name— Theophilus Cibber says, " A 
great number of our authoress' poems still continue 
unpublished, in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Creake." 
In 1884 I saw advertised, in an obscure book-list, 
a folio volume of old manuscript poetry. Something 
excited my curiosity, and I sent for it. It proved to 
be a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne 
Finch. I immediately communicated with the 
bookseller, and asked him whence it came. He 
replied that it had been sold, with furniture, pictures 
and books, at the dispersing of the effects of a family 
of the name of Creake. Thank you, divine Ardelia ! 
It was well done; it was worthy of you. 

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is not a com- 
manding figure in history, but she is an isolated and a 
well-defined one. She is what one of the precursors 
of Shakespeare calls " a diminutive excelsitude." 
She was entirely out of sympathy with her age, and 
her talent was hampered and suppressed by her 
conditions. She was the solitary writer of actively 
developed romantic tastes between Marvell and 
Gray, and she was not strong enough to create an 
atmosphere for herself within the vacuum in which 
she languished. The facts of her life are extremely 
scanty, although they may now be considerably 
augmented by the help of my folio. She was born 
about 1660, the daughter of a Hampshire baronet. 
She was maid of honour to Mary of Modena, Duchess 
of York, and at Court she met Heneage Finch, who 



Lady Winchilsea's Poems 103 



was gentleman of the bed-chamber to the Duke. 
They married in 1685, probably on the occasion of 
the enthronement of their master and mistress, and 
when the crash came in 1688, they fled together to the 
retirement of Eastwell Park. They inhabited this 
mansion for the rest of their lives, although it was 
not until the death of his nephew, in 1712, that 
Heneage Finch became fourth Earl of Winchilsea. 
In 1713 Anne was at last persuaded to publish a 
selection of her poems, and in 1720 she died. The 
Earl survived her until 1726. 

My manuscript was written, I think, in or about 
the year 1696 — that is to say, when Mrs. Finch was 
in retirement from the Court. She has adopted 
the habit of writing, 

Betrayed by solitude to try 
Amusements, which the prosperous fly. 

But her exile from the world gives her no dis- 
quietude. It seems almost an answer to her prayer. 
Years before, when she was at the centre of fashion 
in the Court of James II., she had written in an 
epistle to the Countess of Thanet : 

Give me, O indulgent Fate, 

Give me yet, before I die, 

A sweet, but absolute retreat, 

'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high, 

That the world may ne'er invade, 

Through such windings and such shade, 

My unshaken liberty. 

This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still 
more rarely felt by English ladies at the close of the 
seventeenth century. What their real opinion 
usually was is clothed in crude and ready language 



104 Gossip in a Library 

by the heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell. Like 
Lucia, in the comedy of Epsom Wells, to live out of 
London was to live in a wilderness, with bears and 
wolves as one's companions. Alone in that age 
Anne Finch truly loved the country, for its own sake, 
and had an eye to observe its features. 

She had one trouble, constitutional low spirits : 
she was a terrible sufferer from what was then 
known as " The Spleen." She wrote a long pindaric 
Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany 
in 1701, and was her first introduction to the public. 
She talks much about her melancholy in her verses, 
but, with singular good sense, she recognised that 
it was physical, and she tried various nostrums. 
Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least 
service : 

In vain to chase thee every art I try, 
In vain all remedies apply, 
In vain the Indian leaf infuse, 
Or the parch'd eastern berry bruise, 
Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use. 

Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking 
hours, and took sleep from her eyelids at night : 

How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest, 
To a sad mind, with cares oppressed? 
By what soft means shall I invite 
Thy powers into my soul to-night P 
Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come, 
Such darkness shall prepare the room 
As thy own palace overspreads, — 
Thy palace stored with peaceful beds, — 
And Silence, too, shall on thee wait 
Deep, as in the Turkish State ; 
Whilst, still as death, I will be found, 
My arms by one another bound, 



Lady Winchilsea's Poems 105 



And my dull limbs so closed shall be 
As if already seaVd by thee. 

She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge 
Wells, but without avail. When the abhorred fit 
came on, the world was darkened to her. Only 
two things could relieve her — the soothing influence 
of solitude with nature and the Muses, or the 
sympathetic presence of her husband. She dis- 
dained the little feminine arts of her age : 

Nor will in fading silks compose 

Faintly the inimitable rose, 

Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass 

The Sovereign's blurred and indistinguished face, 

The threatening angel and the speaking ass. 

But she will wander at sundown through the 
exquisite woods of Eastwell, and will watch the 
owlets in their downy nest or the nightingale 
silhouetted against the fading sky. Then her con- 
stitutional depression passes, and she is able once 
more to be happy : 

Our sighs are then but vernal air, 
But April-drops our tears, 

as she says in delicious numbers that might be 
Wordsworth's own. In these delightful moments, 
released from the burden of her tyrant malady, her 
eyes seem to have been touched with the herb 
euphrasy, and she has the gift, denied to the rest of 
her generation, of seeing nature and describing 
what she sees. In these moods, this contemporary 
of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate 
transcripts of country life as the following : 



io6 



Gossip in a Library 



When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads, 
Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, 
Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear, 
Jill torn-up forage in his teeth we hear ; 
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, 
And unmolested kine re chew the cud : 
When curlews cry beneath the village-walls, 
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls. 

In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, 
to which she was particularly partial, and to this she 
commonly turned her footsteps. 

Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to 
reverie, she could be gay enough upon occasion, 
and her sprightly poems have a genuine sparkle. 
Here is an anacreontic — written " for my brother 
Leslie Finch " — which has never before been 
printed : 

From the Park, and the Play, 

And Whitehall, come away 
To the Punch-bowl by far more inviting ; 

To the fops and the beaux 

Leave those dull empty shows, 
And see here what is truly delighting. 

"V 

The half globe His in figure, 

And would it were bigger, 
Yet here's the whole universe floating ; 

Here's titles and places, 

Rich lands, and fair faces, 
And all that is worthy our doting. 

'Twas a world like to this 

The hot Grecian did miss, 
Of whom histories keep such a pother ; 

To the bottom he sunk, 

And when he had drunk, 
Grew maudlin, and wept for another. 



Lady Winchilsea's Poems 107 



At another point, Anne Finch bore very little 
likeness to her noisy sisterhood of fashion. In 
an age when it was the height of ill-breeding for 
a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardelia 
was not ashamed to confess that Daphnis — for so 
she styled the excellent Heneage Finch — absorbed 
every corner of her mind that was not occupied by 
the Muses. It is a real pleasure to transcribe, for 
the first time since they were written on the 2nd 
of April, 1685, these honest couplets : 

This, to the crown and blessing of my life, 
The much-loved husband of a happy wife ; 
To him whose constant passion found the art 
To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart ; 
And to the world by tenderest proof discovers 
They err who say that husbands carft be lovers. 
With such return of passion as is due, 
Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue, 
Daphnis, my hopes, my joys are bounded all in you ! 

Nearly thirty years later the same accent is 
audible, thinned a little by advancing years, and 
subdued from passion to tenderness, yet as genuine 
as at first. When at length the Earl began to suffer 
from the gout, his faithful family songster recorded 
that also in her amiable verse, and prayed that " the 
bad disease " 

May you but brief unfrequent visits find 
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind. 

No one can read her sensitive verses, and not be 
sure that she was the sweetest and most soothing 
of bed-side visitants. 

It was a quiet life which Daphnis and Ardelia 
spent in the recesses of Eastwell Park. They saw 



io8 Gossip in a Library 



little company and paid few visits. There was a 
stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable 
Thynnes at Longleat, and Anne Finch seldom 
omitted to leave behind her a metrical tribute to the 
beauties of that mansion. They seem to have kept 
up little connection with the Court or with London. 
There is no trace of literary society in this volume. 
Nicholas Rowe twice sent down for their perusal 
translations which he had made ; and from another 
source we learn that Lady Winchilsea had a brisk 
passage of compliments with Pope. But these were 
rare incidents. We have rather to think of the long 
years spent in the seclusion of Eastwell, by these 
gentle impoverished people of quality, the husband 
occupied with his mathematical studies, his painting, 
the care of his garden; the wife studying further 
afield in her romantic reverie, watching the birds 
in wild corners of her park, carrying her Tasso, 
hidden in a fold of her dress, to a dell so remote that 
she forgets the way back, and has to be carried 
home " in a Water-cart driven by one of the Under- 
keepers in his green Coat, with a Hazle-bough for a 
Whip." It is a little oasis of delicate and pensive 
refinement in that hot close of the seventeenth 
century, when so many unseemly monsters were 
bellowing in the social wilderness. 



AMASIA 



AMASIA 



Amasia : or, The Works of the Muses. A Collection of Poems. In three 
'volumes. By Mr, John Hopkins. London : Printed by Tho. Warren, 
for Bennet Banbury, at the Blue- Anchor, in the Lower-Walk of the 
New-Exchange, 1700. 

It has often been remarked that if the author of the 
poorest collection of minor verse would accurately 
relate in his quavering numbers what his personal 
observations and adventures have been, his book 
would not be entirely without value. But ninety- 
nine times out of a hundred, this is precisely what he 
cannot do. His rhymes carry him whither he would 
not, and he is lost in a fog of imitated phrases and 
spurious sensations. The very odd and very rare 
set of three little volumes, which now come before 
us, offer a curious exception to this rule. The 
author of Amasia was no poet, but he possessed the 
faculty of writing with exactitude about himself. 
He prattled on in heroic couplets from hour to hour, 
recording the tiny incidents of his life. At first 
sight, his voluble miscellany seems a mere wilderness 
of tame verses, but when we examine it closely a 
story gradually evolves. We come to know John 
Hopkins, and live in the intimacy of his circle. His 
poems contain a novelette in solution. So far as I 
can discover, nothing whatever is known of him save 
what he reveals of himself, and no one, I think, has 
ever searched his three uninviting volumes. In the 

in 



1 1 2 Gossip in a Library 



following paragraphs I have put together his story 
as it is to be found in the pages of Atnasia. 

By a single allusion to the Epistolary Poems of 
Charles Hopkins, " very well perform'd by my 
Brother/' in 1694, we are able to identify the author 
of Amasia with certainty. He was the second son 
of the Right Rev. Ezekiel Hopkins, Lord Bishop of 
Deny. The elder brother whom we have mentioned, 
Charles, was considerably his senior; for six years 
the latter occupied a tolerably prominent place in 
London literary society, was the intimate friend of 
Dryden and Congreve, published three or four plays 
not without success, and possessed a name which is 
pretty frequently met with in books of the time. 
But to John Hopkins I have discovered scarcely an 
allusion. He does not seem to have moved in his 
brother's circle, and his society was probably more 
courtly than literary. If we may trust his own 
account the author of Amasia was born, doubtless at 
Londonderry, on the 1st of January, 1675. He was, 
therefore, only twenty-five when his poems were 
published, and the exquisitely affected portrait 
which adorns the first volume must represent him 
as younger still, since it was executed by the Dutch 
engraver, F. H. van Hove, who was found murdered 
in October, 1698. 

Pause a moment, dear reader, and observe Mr. 
John Hopkins, alias Sylvius, set out with all the 
artillery of ornament to storm the heart of Amasia. 
Notice his embroidered silken coat, his splendid lace 
cravat, the languishment of his large foolish eyes, 
the indubitable touch of Spanish red on those 
smooth cheeks. But, above all contemplate the 



Amasia 



wonders of his vast peruke. He has a name, be 
sure, for every portion of that killing structure. 
Those sausage-shaped curls, close to the ears, are 
confidants ; those that dangle round the temples, 
favorites ; the sparkling lock that descends alone 
over the right eyebrow is the passagere ; and, above 
all, the gorgeous knot that unites the curls and 
descends on the left breast, is aptly named the 
meurtriere. If he would but turn his head, we should 
see his creves-cceur, the two delicate curled locks at 
the nape of his neck. The escutcheon below his 
portrait bears, very suitably, three loaded muskets 
rampant. Such was Sylvius, conquering but, alas ! 
not to conquer. 

The youth of John Hopkins was passed in the 
best Irish society. His father, the Bishop, married 
— apparently in second nuptials, for John speaks 
not of her as a man speaks of his mother — the 
daughter of the Earl of Radnor. Lady Araminta 
Hopkins seems to have been a friend of Isabella, 
Duchess of Grafton, the exquisite girl who, at the 
age of five, had married a bridegroom of nine, and 
at twenty-three was left a widow, to be the first 
toast in English society. The poems of John 
Hopkins are dedicated to this Dowager-duchess, 
who, when they were published, had already for two 
years been the wife of Sir Thomas Hanmer. At the 
age of twelve, and probably in Dublin, Hopkins 
met the mysterious lady who animates these volumes 
under the name of Amasia. Who was Amasia ? 
That, alas ! even the volubility of her lover does 
not reveal. But she was Irish, the daughter of a 
wealthy and perhaps titled personage, and the 



H4 Gossip in a Library 



intimate companion for many years of the beautiful 
Duchess of Grafton. 

Love did not begin at first sight. Sylvius played 
with Amasia when they both were children, and 
neither thought of love. Later on, in early youth, 
the poet was devoted only to a male friend, one 
Martin. To him ecstatic verses are inscribed : 

O Martin ! Martin ! let the grateful sound 

Reach to that Heaven which has our Friendship crowd d, 

And, like our endless Friendship, meet no bound. 

But alas ! one day Martin came back, after a long 
absence, and, although he still 

With generous, kind, continued Friendship burn'd, 

he found Sylvius entirely absorbed by Amasia. 
Martin knew better than to show temper; he 
accepted the situation, and 

the lotfd Amasicv } s Health -flew round, 
Amasia' } s Health the Golden Goblets crown* d. 

Now began the first and happiest portion of the 
story. Amasia had no suspicion of the feelings of 
the poet, and he was only too happy to be permitted 
to watch her movements. He records, in successive 
copies of verses, the various things she did. He 
seems to have been on terms of delightful intimacy 
with the lady, and he calls all sorts of people of the 
highest position to witness how he suffered. To Lady 
Sandwich are dedicated poems on " Amasia, drawing 
her own Picture," on " Amasia, playing with a 
Clouded Fan," on " Amasia, singing, and sticking 
pins in a Red Silk Pincushion." We are told how 
Amasia " looked at me through a Multiplying-Glass," 



Amasia 



how she was troubled with a redness in her eyes, how 
she danced before a looking-glass, how her flowered 
muslin nightgown (or " night-rail/ ' as he calls it) 
took fire, and how, though she promised to sing, yet 
she never performed. We have a poem on the 
circumstance that Amasia, " having prick'd me with 
a Pin, accidentally scratch'd herself with it; " and 
another on her " asking me if I slept well after so 
tempestuous a night." But perhaps the most 
intimate of all is a poem " To Amasia, tickling a 
Gentleman/' It was no perfunctory tickling that 
Amasia administered : 

While round his sides your nimble Fingers flayed, 
With ^leasing softness did they swiftly rove, 
While, at each touch, they made his Heart-strings move. 
As round his Breast, his ravish' 'd Breast they crowd, 
We hear their Musick when he laughs aloud. 

This is probably the only instance in literature in 
which a gentleman has complacently celebrated in 
verse the fact that his lady-love has tickled some 
other gentleman. 

But this generous simplicity was not long to last. 
In 1690 Hopkins's father, the Bishop, had died. We 
may conjecture that Lady Araminta took charge of 
the boy, and that his home, in vacation time, was 
with her in Dublin or London. He writes like a 
youth who has always been petted; the frou-frou 
of fine ladies' petticoats is heard in all his verses. 
But he had no fortune and no prospects; he was 
utterly, he confesses, without ambition. The stern 
papa of Amasia had no notion of bestowing her on 
the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began to 
court her in earnest, she rebuffed him. She tore 
1 2 



1 1 6 Gossip in a Library 



up his love-letters, she teased him by sending her 
black page to the window when he was ogling for 
her in the street below, she told him he was too young 
for her, and although she had no objection to his 
addressing verses to her, she gave him no serious 
encouragement. She was to be married, he hints, 
to some one of her own rank — some rich " country 
booby/' 

At last, early in 1698, in company with the 
Duchess of Grafton, and possibly on the occasion 
of the second marriage of the latter, Amasia was 
taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her 
again. A year later he received news of her death, 
and his little romance was over. He became ill, 
and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician 
of the day, was called in to attend him. The third 
volume closes by his summoning the faithful and 
unupbraiding Martin back to his heart : 

Love lives in Sun- Shine, or that Storm, Despair, 
But gentler Friendship Breathes a Moderate Air* 

And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish 
ladies, his fashionable Muses, and his trite and 
tortured fancy, disappears into thin air. 

The only literary man whom he mentions as 
a friend is George Farquhar, himself a native of 
Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins. 
This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to 
as Daphnis, sometimes under his own name. Before 
the performance of Love and a Bottle, Hopkins 
prophesied for the author a place where 

Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit, 
The great Uriumvirate of Comick Wit, 



Amasia 



117 



and later on he thought that even Collier himself 
ought to commend the Constant Couple, or A Trip 
to the Jubilee. At the first performance of this 
play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly 
perturbed by the presence of a lady who reminded 
him of Amasia, and when he visited the theatre next 
he was less pleased with the play. He had a vague 
and infelicitous scheme for turning Paradise Lost 
into rhyme. These are the only traces of literary 
bias. In other respects Hopkins is interested in 
nothing more serious than a lock of Amasia's hair ; 
the china cup she had, " round the sides of which 
were painted Trees, and at the bottom a Naked 
Woman Weeping; " her box of patches, in which 
she finds a silver penny; or the needlework em- 
broidered on her gown. When Amasia died there 
was no reason why Sylvius should continue to exist, 
and he fades out of our vision like a ghost. 



LOVE AND BUSINESS 



LOVE AND BUSINESS 



Love and Business : in a Collection of occasionary Verse and epistolary Prose, 
not hitherto published. By Mr. George Farquhar. En Orenge il n'y a 
point d'oranges. London, printed for B. Linton, at the Post-House, in 
the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleet Street. 1702. 

There are some books, like some people, of whom 
we form an indulgent opinion without finding it 
easy to justify our liking. The young man who 
went to the life-insurance office and reported that 
his father had died of no particular disease, but 
just of " plain death/' would sympathise with the 
feeling I mention. Sometimes we like a book, not 
for any special merit, but just because it is what 
it is. The rare, and yet not celebrated, miscellany 
of which I am about to write has this character. 
It is not instructive, or very high-toned, or excep- 
tionally clever, but if it were a man, all people 
that are not prigs would say that it was a very 
good sort of fellow. If it be, as it certainly is, a 
literary advantage for a nondescript collection of 
trifles, to reproduce minutely the personality of its 
writer, then Love and Business has one definite 
merit. Wherever we dip into its pages we may 
use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, 
of the year 1700, talking to himself and to his 
friends in the most unaffected accents. 

Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and- 
twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like 

121 



122 Gossip in a Library 



Irishman, of " a splenetic and amorous complexion/' 
half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a 
very honest and gallant gentleman. He had taken 
to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had 
written Love and a Bottle, Since then, two other 
plays, The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair, 
had proved that he had wit and fancy, and knew 
how to knit them together into a rattling comedy. 
But he was poor, always in pursuit of that timid 
wild-fowl, the occasional guinea, and with no sort 
of disposition to settle down into a heavy citizen. 
In order to bring down a few brace of golden game, 
he shovels into Lintott's hands his stray verses of 
all kinds, a bundle of letters he wrote from Holland, 
a dignified essay or discourse upon Comedy, and, 
with questionable taste perhaps, a set of copies of 
the love-letters he had addressed to the lady who 
became his wife. All this is not very praiseworthy, 
and as a contribution to literature it is slight 
indeed; but, then, how genuine and sincere, how 
guileless and picturesque is the self-revelation of 
it ! There is no attempt to make things better 
than they are, nor any pandering to a cynical 
taste by making them worse. Why should he 
conceal or falsify ? The town knows what sort of 
a fellow George Farquhar is. Here are some 
letters and some verses ; the beaux at White's may 
read them if they will, and then throw them away. 

As we turn the desultory pages, the figure of 
the author rises before us, good-natured, easy- 
going, high-coloured, not bad-looking, with an air 
of a gentleman in spite of his misfortunes. We do 
not know the exact details of his military honours. 



Love and Business 123 



We may think of him as swaggering in scarlet 
regimentals, but we have his own word for it that 
he was often in mufti. His mind is generally- 
dressed, he says, like his body, in black ; for though 
he is so brisk a spark in company, he suffers sadly 
from the spleen when he is alone. We can follow 
him pretty closely through his day. He is a queer 
mixture of profanity and piety, of coarseness and 
loyalty, of cleverness and density; we do not 
breed this kind of beau nowadays, and yet we might 
do worse, for this specimen is, with all his faults, 
a man. He dresses carefully in the morning, in 
his uniform or else in his black suit. When he 
wants to be specially smart, as, for instance, when 
he designs a conquest at a birthday-party, he has 
to ferret among the pawnbrokers for scraps of 
finery, or secure on loan a fair, full-bottom wig. 
But he is not so impoverished that he cannot on 
these occasions give his valet and his barber plenty 
of work to do preparing his face with razors, per- 
fumes and washes. He would like to be Sir Fopling 
Flutter, if he could afford it, and gazes a little 
enviously at that noble creature in his French 
clothes, as he lounges luxuriantly past him in his 
coach with six before and six behind. 

Poor Captain Farquhar begins to expect that 
he himself will never be " a first-rate Beau." So, 
on common mornings, a little splenetic, he wanders 
down to the coffee-houses and reads the pamphlets, 
those which find King William glorious, and those 
that rail at the watery Dutch. He will even be 
a little Jacobitish for pure foppery, and have a 
fling at the Church, but in his heart he is with the 



124 Gossip in a Library 



Ministry. He meets a friend at White's, and they 
adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern, where 
the drawer brings them a bottle of New French 
and a neat's tongue, over which they discuss the 
doctrine of predestination so hotly that two 
mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their lifted 
voices for a cry for fish. His friend has business 
in the city, and so our poet strolls off to the Park, 
and takes a turn in the Mall with his hat in his 
hand, prepared for an adventure or a chat with a 
friend. Then comes the play, the inevitable early 
play, still, even in 1700, apt to be so rank-lipped 
that respectable ladies could only appear at it in 
masks. It was the transition period, and poor 
Comedy, who was saying good-bye to literature, 
was just about to console herself with modesty. 

However, a domino may slip aside, and Mr. 
George Farquhar notices a little lady in a deep 
mourning mantua, whose eyes are not to be for- 
gotten. She goes, however; it is useless to pursue 
her; but the music raises his soul to such a pitch 
6i passion that he is almost melancholy. He 
strolls out into Spring Garden, but there, " with 
envious eyes, I saw every Man pick up his Mate, 
whilst I alone walked like solitary Adam before 
the Creation of his Eve; but the place was no 
Paradise to me; nothing I found entertaining but 
the Nightingale." So that in those sweet summer 
evenings of 1700, over the laced and brocaded 
couples promenading in Spring Garden, as over 
good Sir Roger twelve years later, the indulgent 
nightingale still poured her notes. To-day you 
cannot hear the very bells of St. Martin's for the 



Love and Business 



roar of the traffic. So lonely, and too easily 
enamoured, George has to betake himself to the 
tavern, and a passable Burgundy. There is no 
idealism about him. He is very fit for repentance 
next morning. " The searching Wine has sprung 
the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head 
aches, my Stomach pukes." Our poor, good- 
humoured beau has no constitution for this mode 
of life, and we know, though happily he dreams not 
of it, that he is to die before he reaches thirty. 

This picture of Farquhar's life is nowhere given 
in the form just related, but not one touch in the 
portrait but is to be found somewhere in the frank 
and easy pages of Love and Business. The poems 
are of their age and kind. There is a " Pindarick," 
of course; it was so easy to write one, and so re- 
putable. There are compliments in verse to one 
of the female wits who were writing then for the 
stage, Mrs. Trotter, author of the Fatal Friendship ; 
there are amatory explanations of all kinds. When 
he fails to keep an appointment with a lady on 
account of the rain — for there were no umbrellas 
in those days — he likens himself to Leander, wistful 
on the Sestian shore. He is not always very 
discreet; Damon's thoughts when "Night's black 
Curtain o'er the World was spread " were very 
innocent, but such as we have decided nowadays 
to say nothing about. It was the fashion of the 
time to be outspoken. There is no value, however, 
in the verse, except that it is graphic now and then. 
The letters are much more interesting. Those sent 
from Holland in the autumn of 1700 are very good 
reading. I make bold to quote one passage from 



126 Gossip in a Library 



the first, describing the storm he encountered in 
crossing. It depicts our hero to the life, with all 
his inconsistencies. He says : " By a kind of 
Poetical Philosophy I bore up pretty well under my 
Apprehensions; though never worse prepared for 
Death, I must confess, for I think I never had so 
much Money about me at a time. We had some 
Ladies aboard, that were so extremely sick, that 
they often wished for Death, but were damnably 
afraid of being drown'd. But, as the Scripture 
says, ' Sorrow may last for a Night, but Joy cometh 
in the Morning/ " and so on. The poor fellow 
means no harm by all this, as Hodgson once said 
of certain remarks of Byron's. 

The love-letters are very curious. It is believed 
that the sequel of them was a very unhappy marriage. 
Captain Farquhar was of a loving disposition, and 
as inflammable as a hay-rick. He cannot have been 
much more than twenty-one when he described 
what he desired in a wife. " O could I find," he 
said — 

could I -find {Grant, Heaven, that once I may f) 
A Nymph fair, kind, poetical and gay, 

Whose Love should blaze, unsullied and divine, 
Lighted at first by the bright Lamp of mine, 
Free as a Mistress, faithful as a wife, 
And one that lov'd a Fiddle as her Life, 
Free from all sordid Ends, from Interest free, 
For my own Sake affecting only me, 
What a blest Union should our Souls combine ! 

1 hers alone, and she be only mine ! 

It does not seem a very exacting ideal, but the 
poor poet missed it. Whether Mrs. Farquhar loved 



Love and Business 



127 



a fiddle as her life is not recorded, but she certainly 
was not free from all sordid ends and unworthy 
tricks. The little lady in the mourning mantua 
soon fell in love with our gallant spark, and when 
he made court to her, she represented herself as 
very wealthy. The deed accomplished, Mrs. 
Farquhar turned out to be penniless ; and the poet, 
like a gentleman as he was, never reproached her, 
but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty. In 
Love and Business the story does not proceed so 

far. He receives Miss Penelope V 's timid 

advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much 
in love with his little lady as she with him, and is 
making broad demands and rich-blooded confidences 
in fine style, no offence taken where no harm is 
meant. In one of the letters to Penelope we get 
a very interesting glance at a famous, and, as it 
happens, rather obscure, event — the funeral of the 
great Dry den, in May 1700. Farquhar says : 

" I come now from Mr. Dryden's Funeral, where 
we had an Ode in Horace sung, instead of David's 
Psalms ; whence you may find that we don't think 
a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the 
Ceremony was a kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, 
I think, for Hudibras than him; because the 
Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an 
extraordinary Man, and bury'd after an extra- 
ordinary Fashion ; for I believe there was never such 
another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great 
and ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the 
Author [Dr. Garth], whose Prescriptions can restore 
the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead. And 



128 Gossip in a Library 



so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same 
with his Life, — Variety, and not of a Piece. The 
Quality and Mob, Farce and Heroicks, the Sublime 
and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in a 
Hackney Coach/' 



WHAT ANN LANG READ 



WHAT ANN LANG READ 



Who was Ann Lang ? Alas ! I am not sure ; but 
she flourished one hundred and sixty years ago t 
under his glorious Majesty, George L, and I have 
become the happy possessor of a portion of her 
library. It consists of a number of cheap novels, 
all published in 1723 and 1724, when Ann Lang 
probably bought them; and each carries, written 
on the back of the title, " ann Lang book 1727/' 
which is doubtless the date of her lending them to 
some younger female friend. The letters of this 
inscription are round and laboriously shaped, while 
the form is always the same, and never " Ann 
Lang, her book," which is what one would expect. 
It is not the hand of a person of quality : I venture 
to conclude that she who wrote it was a milliner's 
apprentice or a servant-girl. There are five novels 
in this little collection, and a play, and a pamphlet 
of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all signed 
upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, 
the great Eliza Haywood. 

No one who has not dabbled among old books 
knows how rare have become the strictly popular 
publications of a non-literary kind which a genera- 
tion of the lower middle class has read and thrown 
away. Eliza Haywood lives in the minds of men 
solely through one very coarse and cruel allusion 
k 2 131 



132 Gossip in a Library 



to her made by Pope in the Dunciad. She was 
never recognised among people of intellectual 
quality ; she ardently desired to belong to literature, 
but her wish was never seriously gratified, even by 
her friend Aaron Hill. Yet she probably numbered 
more readers, for a year or two, than any other 
person in the British realm. She poured forth what 
she called " little Performances " from a tolerably 
respectable press; and the wonder is that in these 
days her abundant writings are so seldom to be 
met with. The secret doubtless is that her large 
public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann 
Lang. Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, 
by seamstresses, by basket-women, by 'prentices 
of all sorts, male and female, but mostly the latter. 
For girls of this sort there was no other reading 
of a light kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood 
or nothing. The men of the same class read 
Defoe ; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence 
of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards 
women, was not likely to be preferred by " straggling 
nymphs/' The footman might read Roxana, and 
the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over Moll 
Flanders ; there was much in these romances to 
interest men. But what had Ann Lang to do with 
stories so cold and harsh ? She read Eliza Haywood. 

But most of her sisters, of Eliza's great clientele, 
did not know how to treat a book. They read 
it to tatters, and they threw it away. It may 
be news to some readers that these early novels 
were very cheap. Ann Lang bought Love in Excess, 
which is quite a thick volume, for two shillings; 
and the first volume of Idalia (for Eliza was Ouida- 



What Ann Lang Read 133 



esque even in her titles) only cost her eight een-pence. 
She seems to have been a clean girl. She did not 
drop warm lard on the leaves. She did not tottle 
up her milk-scores on the bastard-title. She did 
not scribble in the margin " Emanuella is a foul 
wench." She did not dog's-ear her little library, 
or stain it, or tear it. I owe it to that rare and 
fortunate circumstance of her neatness that her 
beloved books have come into my possession after 
the passage of so many generations. It must be 
recollected that Eliza Haywood lived in the very 
twilight of English fiction. Sixteen years were still 
to pass, in 1724, before the British novel properly 
began to dawn in Pamela, twenty-five years before 
it broke in the full splendour of Tom Jones. Eliza 
Haywood simply followed where, two generations 
earlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led. 
She preserved the old romantic manner, a kind of 
corruption of the splendid Scudery and Calprenede 
folly of the middle of the seventeenth century. 
All that distinguished her was her vehement ex- 
uberance and the emptiness of the field. Ann 
Lang was young, and instinctively attracted to the 
study of the passion of love. She must read some- 
thing, and there was nothing but Eliza Haywood 
for her to read. 

The heroines of these old stories were all palpitat- 
ing with sensibility, although that name had not 
yet been invented to describe their condition. 
When they received a letter beginning " To the 
divine Lassellia," or "To the incomparable Donna 
Emanuella," they were thrown into the most 
violent disorder ; "a thousand different Passions 



134 Gossip in a Library 



succeeded one another in their turns," and as a rule 
" 'twas all too sudden to admit disguise/' When 
a lady in Eliza Haywood's novels receives a note 
from a gentleman, " all her Limbs forget their 
Function, and she sinks fainting on the Bank, in 
much the same posture as she was before she rais'd 
herself a little to take the Letter." I am positive 
that Ann Lang practised this series of attitudes 
in the solitude of her garret. 

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's 
first page to her last. The implacable Douxmoure 
(for such was her singular name) " continued for 
some time in a Condition little different from Mad- 
ness; but when Reason had a little recovered 
its usual Sway, a deadly Melancholy succeeded 
Passion." When Bevillia tried to explain to her 
cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, 
the young lady swooned twice before she seized 
Bevillia's " cruel meaning; " and then — ah ! then — 
" silent the stormy Passions roll'd in her tortured 
Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or 
complaining. It was a considerable time before 
she utter'd the least Syllable; and when she did, she 
seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and 
cry'd, 1 It is enough — in knowing one I know the 
whole deceiving Sex ' "; and she began to address 
an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting. 

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood 
greatly troubled herself. A contemporary admirer 
remarked, with justice : 

'Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires ; 

Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires ; 

'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms, 

And tears Amena from her Father's Arms. 



What Ann Lang Read 135 



These last-named persons are the hero and heroine 
of Love in Excess ; or The Fatal Inquiry, which 
seems to have been the most popular of the whole 
series. This novel might be called Love Through 
a Window ; for it almost entirely consists of a 
relation of how the gentleman prowled by moonlight 
in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated disorder, 
peeped out of her lattice in "a most charming 
Dishabillee." Alas ! there was a lock to the door 
of a garden staircase, and while the lady " was 
paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous 
enough to slip the Key out of the Door unper- 
ceived." Ann Lang ! — " a sudden cry of Murder, 
and the noise of clashing Swords," come none too 
soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you 
had in readiness for the turning of the page ! Eliza 
Haywood assures us, in Idalia, that her object in 
writing is that " the Warmth and Vigour of Youth 
may be temper'd by a due Consideration " ; yet 
the moralist must complain that she goes a strange 
way about it. Idalia herself was " a lovely In- 
considerate " of Venice, who escaped in a " Gondula " 
up " the River Brent," and set all Vicenza by the 
ears through her " stock of Haughtiness, which 
nothing could surmount." At last, after adventures 
which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia 
abruptly " remember'd to have heard of a Monastery 
at Verona," and left Vicenza at break of day, taking 
her " unguarded languishments " out of that city 
and out of the novel. It is true that Ann Lang, 
for 2s., bought a continuation of the career of Idalia; 
but we need not follow her. 
The perusal of so many throbbing and melting 



i 3 6 



Gossip in a Library 



romances must necessarily have awakened in the 
breast of female readers a desire to see the creator 
of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my 
readers that there is every reason to believe that 
Ann Lang gratified this innocent wish. At all 
events, there exists among her volumes the little 
book of the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane 
Theatre, when, in the summer of 1724, Eliza 
Haywood's new comedy of A Wife to be Lett was 
acted there, with the author performing in the part 
of Mrs. Graspall. The play itself is wretched, and 
tradition says that it owed what little success it 
enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's 
readers felt to gaze upon her features. She was 
about thirty years of age at the time; but no one 
says that she was handsome, and she was un- 
doubtedly a bad actress. I think the disappoint- 
ment that evening at the Theatre Royal opened the 
eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was the appearance 
of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old 
admirer from buying The Secret History of Cleomina, 
suppos'd dead, which I miss from the collection. 

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of 
Pamela — especially if during the interval she had 
bettered her social condition — with what ardour 
must she have hailed the advent of what, with all 
its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps 
she went to Vauxhall with it in her muff, and shook 
it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her 
acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to 
see one great novel after another break forth to 
lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked 
back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza 



What Ann Lang Read 137 



Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating in- 
trigues, with positive disgust. The English novel 
began in 1740, and after that date there was always 
something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters 
to read. 



CATS 



I 



CATS 



Les Chats. A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, 
MDCCXXFIII. 

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells 
me that she is preparing an anthology of the cat. 
This announcement has reminded me of one of the 
oddest and most entertaining volumes in my 
library. People who collect prints of the eighteenth 
century know an engraving which represents a 
tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of 
a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a 
volume. The volume is Les Chats, the book before 
us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable 
and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He 
was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch 
parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. 
All we know of his earlier years is to be found in 
a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes 
Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant 
of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and 
seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of 
gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by 
the art with which he purveyed little dramas for 
the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in 
France. Somebody said of him, when he was 
famous as the laureate of the cats, that he had 
risen in life by never scratching, by always having 

141 



142 Gossip in a Library 



velvet paws, and by never putting up his back, 
even when he was startled. Voltaire called him 
" my very dear Sylph," and he was the ideal of all 
that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and 
well-bred. He slipped unobtrusively into the 
French Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, 
dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music 
and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting 
to be a sad old rogue to the very last. 

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is 
now remembered, was the sole production of his 
lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He was 
forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject 
was considered a little frivolous, even for such a 
petit conteur as Moncrif . People continued to tease 
him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did 
was the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy 
made an epigram about " cats " and " rats/' in 
execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our Sylph 
to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais 
Royal and beat Roy with a stick when he came 
out. The poet was, perhaps, not much hurt; at 
all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, 
" Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet ! " 
It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected 
into the French Academy, and then the shower 
of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be 
made historiographer; " Oh, nonsense," the wits 
cried, " he must mean historiogriffe," and they 
invited him, on nights when the Academy met, 
to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimney- 
pots. He had the weakness to apologise for his 
charming book, and to withdraw it from circulation. 



Cats 



H3 



His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his Zelindors 
and Zeloides and Erosines, which to us seem utterly 
vapid and frivolous, never gave him a moment's 
uneasiness. His crumpled rose-leaf was the book 
by which his name lives in literature. 

The book of cats is written in the form of eleven 

letters to Madame la Marquise de B . The 

anonymous author represents himself as too much 
excited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fashion- 
able house, where the company was abusing cats. 
He was unsupported; where was the Marquise, 
who would have brought a thousand arguments 
to his assistance, founded on her own experience of 
virtuous pussies ? Instead of going to bed he will 
sit up and indite the panegyric of the feline race. 
He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the 
people he has just left. It culminated in the 
conduct of a lady who declared that cats were 
poison, and who, " when pussy appeared in the 
room, had the presence of mind to faint/ 9 These 
people had rallied him on the absurdity of his 
enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well 
knows, " how many women have a passion for cats, 
and how many men are women in this respect." 

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its 
elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine 
touches of observation and its constant sparkle of 
anecdote. He is troubled to account for the exist- 
ence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that 
when the animals were in the Ark, Noah gave the 
lion a great box on the ear, which made him sneeze, 
and produce a cat out his nose. But the author 
questions this origin, and is more inclined to agree 



144 Gossip in a Library 



with a Turkish Minister of Religion, sometime 
Ambassador to France, that the ape, " weary of a 
sedentary life " in the Ark, paid his attentions to 
a very agreeable young lioness, whose infidelities 
resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat and a Puss-cat, 
and that these, combining the qualities of their 
parents, spread through the Ark un esprit de coquet- 
terie — which lasted during the whole of the sojourn 
there. Moncrif has no difficulty in showing that 
the East has always been devoted to cats, and he 
tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted 
one day on a point of piety, preferred to cut off his 
sleeve, on which his favourite pussy was asleep, 
rather than wake her violently by rising. 

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good 
many curious tributes to the " harmless, necessary 
cat." I am seized with an ambition to put some 
fragments of these into English verse. Most of 
them are highly complimentary. It is true that 
Ronsard was one of those who could not appreciate 
a " matou." He sang or said : 

There is no man now living anywhere 

Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I ; 

I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare. 
And when I see one come, I turn and fly. 

But among the firecieuses of the seventeenth 
century there was much more appreciation. Mme. 
Deshoulieres wrote a whole series of songs and 
couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to 
her husband, referring to the attentions she herself 
receives from admirers, she adds : 

Deshoulieres cares not for the smart 
Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy, 



Cats 



r 45 



But, like a mouse, her idle heart 
Is captured by a fussy. 

Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of 

the Duchess of Lesdiguieres, with its admirable line : 

Chatte four tout le monde, et four les chats tigresse. 

A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, 
is too long to be quoted here, nor can I pause to 
cite the rondeau which the Duchess of Maine 
addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented 
it as follows : 

My fretty fuss, my solace and delight, 

To celebrate thy loveliness aright 

I ought to call to life the bard who sung 

Of Lesbians sf arrow with so sweet a tongue ; 

But His in vain to summon here to me 

So famous a dead fersonage as he, 

And you must take contentedly to-day 

This foor rondeau that Cufid wafts your way. 

When this cat died the Duchess was too much 
affected to write its epitaph herself, and accordingly 
it was done for her, in the following style, by La 
Mothe le Vayer, the author of the Dialogues : 

Puss fasser-by, within this simfle tomb 

Lies one whose life fell Atrofos hath shred ; 
The haffiest cat on earth hath heard her doom, 

And sleefs for ever in a marble bed. 
Alas I what long delicious days Pve seen! 

O cats of Egyft, my illustrious sires, 
Tou who on altars, bound with garlands green, 

Have melted hearts, and kindled fond desires, — 
Hymns in your fraise were faid, and offerings too, 

But Pm not jealous of those rights divine. 
Since Ludovisa loved me, close and true, 

Tour ancient glory was less froud than mine. 
To live a simfle fussy by her side 
Was nobler far than to be deified. 



146 



Gossip in a Library 



To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls 
and romances of his own, while regretting that it 
never occurred to Theocritus to write a bergerie de 
chats. He tells stories of blameless pussies beloved 
by Fontanelle and La Fontaine, and quotes Marot 
in praise of " the green-eyed Venus." But he 
tears himself away at last from all these historical 
reminiscences, and in his eleventh letter he deals 
with cats as they are. We hasten as lightly as 
possible over a story of the disinterestedness of a 
feline Heloise, which is too pathetic for a nineteenth- 
century ear. But we may repeat the touching 
anecdote of Bayle's friend, Mile. Dupuy. This 
lady excelled to a surprising degree in playing the 
harp, and she attributed her excellence in this 
accomplishment to her cat, whose critical taste 
was only equalled by his close attention to Mile. 
Dupuy's performance. She felt that she owed so 
much to this cat, under whose care her reputation 
for skill on the harp had become universal, that 
when she died she left him, in her will, one agreeable 
house in town and another in the country. To this 
bequest she added a revenue sufficient to supply 
all the requirements of a well-bred tom-cat, and at 
the same time she left pensions to certain persons 
whose duty it should be to wait upon him. Her 
ignoble family contested the will, and there was 
a long suit. Moncrif gives a handsome double- 
plate illustration of this incident. Mile. Dupuy, 
sadly wasted by illness, is seen in bed, with her cat 
in her arms, dictating her will to the family lawyer 
in a periwig; her physician is also present. 

This leads me to speak of the illustrations to 



Cats 



H7 



Les Chats, which greatly add to its value. They 
were engraved by Otten from original drawings by 
Coypel. In another edition the same drawings are 
engraved by Count Caylus. Some of them are of 
a charming absurdity. One, a double plate, re- 
presents a tragedy acted by cats on the roof of a 
fashionable house. The actors are tricked out in 
the most magnificent feathers and furbelows, but 
the audience consists of common cats. Cupid sits 
above, with his bow and fluttering wings. Another 
plate shows the mausoleum of the Duchess of Lesdi- 
guieres' cat, with a marble pussy of heroic size, 
upon a marble pillow, in a grove of poplars. Another 
is a medal to " Chat Noir premier, ne en 1725/' 
with the proud inscription, " Knowing to whom 
I belong, I am aware of my value." The profile 
within is that of as haughty a torn as ever shook 
out his whiskers in a lady's boudoir. 



SMART'S POEMS 



SMART'S POEMS 



Poems on Several Occasions. By Christopher Smart, A.M., Fellow of 
Pembroke-Hall, Cambridge. London : Printed for the Author, by 
W. Strahan And sold by J, Newbery, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul's 
Churchyard. MDCCLII. 

The third section of Robert Browning's Parleyings 
with certain People of Importance in their Day drew 
attention to a Cambridge poet of whom little 
had hitherto been known, Christopher Smart, once 
fellow of Pembroke College. It may be interesting, 
therefore, to supply some sketch of the events of 
his life, and of the particular poem which Browning 
has aptly compared to a gorgeous chapel lying 
perdue in a dull old commonplace mansion. No 
one can afford to be entirely indifferent to the 
author of verses which one of the greatest of modern 
writers has declared to be unequalled of their kind 
between Milton and Keats. 

What has hitherto been known of the facts of 
Smart's life has been founded on the anonymous 
biography prefixed to the two-volume Reading 
edition of his works, published in 1791. The copy 
of this edition in Trinity Library belonged to 
Dr. Farmer, and contains these words in his hand- 
writing : " From the Editor, Francis Newbery, Esq. ; 
the Life by Mr. Hunter." As this Newbery was 
the son of Smart's half-brother-in-law and literary 
employer, it may be taken for granted that the 

151 



152 Gossip in a Library 



information given in these volumes is authoritative. 
We may therefore believe it to be correct that 
Smart was born (as he himself tells us, in The Hop 
Garden) at Shipbourne, in Kent, on the nth of 
April 1722, that his father was steward to the 
nobleman who afterwards became Earl of Darlington, 
and that he was " discerned and patronised " by 
the Duchess of Cleveland. This great lady, we 
are left in doubt for what reason, carried her com- 
plaisance so far as to allow the future poet £40 
a year until her death. In a painfully fulsome 
ode to another member of the Raby Castle family, 
Smart records the generosity of the dead in order 
to stimulate that of the living, and oddly remarks 
that 

dignity itself restrains 
By condescension's silken reins, 
While you the lowly Muse upraise. 

Smart passed, already " an infant bard," from what 
he calls " the splendour in retreat " of Raby Castle, 
to Durham School, and in his eighteenth year was 
admitted of Pembroke Hall, October 30, 1739. 
His biographer expressly states that his allowance 
from home was scanty, and that his chief dependence, 
until he derived an income from his college, was 
on the bounty of the Duchess of Cleveland. 

From this point I am able to supply a certain 
amount of information with regard to the poet's 
college life which is entirely new, and which is not, 
I think, without interest. My friend Mr. R. A. Neil 
has been so kind as to admit me to the Treasury 
at Pembroke, and in his company I have had the 



Smart's Poems 



*53 



advantage of searching the contemporary records 
of the college. What we were lucky enough to 
discover may here be briefly summarised. The 
earliest mention of Smart is dated 1740, and refers 
to the rooms assigned to him as an undergraduate. 
In January 1743, we find him taking his B.A., and 
in July of the same year he is elected scholar. 
As is correctly stated in his Life, he became a fellow 
of Pembroke on the 3rd of July 1745. That he 
showed no indication as yet of that disturbance 
of brain and instability of character which so 
painfully distinguished him a little later on, is 
proved by the fact that on the 10th of October 1745, 
Smart was chosen to be Praelector in Philosophy, 
and Keeper of the Common Chest. In 1746 he 
was re-elected to those offices, and also made 
Praelector in Rhetoric. In 1747 he was not chosen 
to hold any such college situations, no doubt from 
the growing extravagance of his conduct. 

In November 1747, Smart was in parlous case. 
Gray complains of his " lies, impertinence and 
ingratitude/' and describes him as confined to his 
room, lest his creditors should snap him up. He 
gives a melancholy impression of Smart's moral 
and physical state, but hastens to add " not that I, 
nor any other mortal, pity him." The records 
of the Treasury at Pembroke supply evidence that 
the members of the college now made a great effort 
to restore one of whose talents it is certain they 
were proud. In 1748 we find Smart proposed for 
catechist, a proof that he had, at all events for the 
moment, turned over a new leaf. Probably, but 
for fresh relapses, he would now have taken orders. 



154 Gossip in a Library 



His allusions to college life are singularly ungracious. 
He calls Pembroke 

this servile cell, 
Where discipline and dulness dwell, 

and commiserates a captive eagle as being doomed 
in the college courts to watch 

scholastic pride 
Take his precise, pedantic stride ; 

words which painfully remind us of Gray's reported 
manner of enjoying a constitutional. It is certain 
that there was considerable friction between these 
two men of genius, and Gray roundly prophesied that 
Smart would find his way to gaol or to Bedlam. 
Both alternatives of this prediction were fulfilled, 
and in October, 1751, Gray curtly remarks : " Smart 
sets out for Bedlam." Of this event we find curious 
evidence in the Treasury. " October 12, 1751 — 
Ordered that Mr. Smart, being obliged to be absent, 
there will be allowed him in lieu of commons for 
the year ended Michaelmas, 1751, the sum of £10." 
There can be little question that Smart's conduct 
and condition became more and more unsatisfactory. 
This particular visit to a madhouse was probably 
brief, but it was possibly not the first and was soon 
repeated; for in 1749 and 1752 there are similar 
entries recording the fact that " Mr. Smart, being 
obliged to be absent/' certain allowances were paid 
by the college " in consideration of his circum- 
stances." The most curious discovery, however, 
which we have been able to make is recorded in 
the following entry : 



Smart's Poems 155 



" Nov. 27, 1753. — Ordered that the dividend 
assigned to Mr. Smart be deposited in the Treasury 
till the Society be satisfied that he has a right to 
the same; it being credibly reported that he has 
been married for some time, and that notice be sent 
to Mr. Smart of his dividend being detained/ ' 

As a matter of fact, Smart was by this time 
married to a relative of Newbery, the publisher, 
for whom he was doing hack work in London. 
He had, however, formed the habit of writing the 
Seatonian prize poem, which he had already gained 
four times, in 1750, 1751, 1752, and 1753. He seems 
to have clutched at the distinction which he brought 
on his college by these poems as the last straw by 
which to keep his fellowship, and, singular to say, 
he must have succeeded ; for on the 16th of January 
1754, this order was recorded : 

" That Mr. Smart have leave to keep his name 
in the college books without any expense, so long 
as he continues to write for the premium left by Mr, 
Seat on." 

How long this inexpensive indulgence lasted does 
not seem to be known. Smart gained the Seatonian 
prize in 1755, having apparently failed in 1754, and 
then appears no more in Pembroke records. 

The circumstance of his having made Cambridge 
too hot to hold him seems to have pulled Smart's 
loose faculties together. The next five years 
were probably the sanest and the busiest in his 
life. He had collected his scattered odes and 
ballads, and published them, with his ambitious 
georgic, The Hop Garden, in the handsome quarto 
before us. Among the seven hundred subscribers to 



156 Gossip in a Library 



this venture we find " Mr. Voltaire, historiographer 
of France/' and M. Roubilliac, the great statuary, 
besides such English celebrities as Gray, Collins, 
Richardson, Savage, Charles Avison, Garrick, and 
Mason. The kind reception of this work awakened 
in the poet an inordinate vanity, which found ex- 
pression, in 1753, in that extraordinary effusion, 
The Hilliad, an attempt to preserve Dr. John Hill 
in such amber as Pope held at the command of his 
satiric passion. But these efforts, and an annual 
Seatonian, were ill adapted to support a poet who 
had recently appended a wife and family to a pheno- 
menal appetite for strong waters, and who, moreover, 
had just been deprived of his stipend as a fellow. 
Smart descended into Grub Street, and bound him- 
self over, hand and foot, to be the serf of such men 
as the publisher Newbery, who was none the milder 
master for being his relative. It was not long after, 
doubtless, that Smart fell lower still, and let himself 
out on a lease for ninety-nine years, to toil for a set 
pittance in the garrets of Gardner's shop; and it 
was about this time, 1754, that the Rev. T. Tyers was 
introduced to Smart by a friend who had more 
sympathy with his frailties than Gray had, namely, 
Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

After a world of vicissitudes, which are very uncom- 
fortable reading, about 1761 Smart became violently 
insane once more and was shut up again in Bedlam. 
Dr. Johnson, commenting on this period of the poet's 
life, told Dr. Burney that Smart grew fat when he 
was in the madhouse, where he dug in the garden, 
and Johnson added : " I did not think he ought to be 
shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. 



Smart's Poems 157 



He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd 
as lief pray with Kit Smart as with any one else. 
Another charge was that he did not love clean linen ; 
and I have no passion for it." When Bos well paid 
Johnson his memorable first visit in 1763, Smart 
had recently been released from Bedlam, and Johnson 
naturally spoke of him. He said : " My poor friend 
Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling 
upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, 
or in any other unusual place/ ' Gray about the 
same time reports that money is being collected 
to help " poor Smart," not for the first time, since 
in January 1759, Gray had written : " Poor Smart 
is not dead, as was said, and Merope is acted for 
his benefit this week," with the Guardian, a farce 
which Garrick had kindly composed for that 
occasion. 

It was in 1763, immediately after Smart's release, 
that the now famous Song to David was published. 
A long and interesting letter in the correspondence 
of Hawkesworth, dated October 1764, gives a 
pleasant idea of Smart restored to cheerfulness and 
placed " with very decent people in a house, most 
delightfully situated, with a terrace that overlooks 
St James's Park." But this relief was only tem- 
porary ; Smart fell back presently into drunkenness 
and debt, and was happily relieved by death in 1770, 
in his forty-eighth year, at the close of a career as 
melancholy as any recorded in the chronicles of 
literature. 

Save for one single lyric, that glows with all the 
flush and bloom of Eden, Smart would take but 
a poor place on the English Parnassus. His odes 



i 58 Gossip in a Library 



and ballads, his psalms and satires, his masques and 
his georgics, are not bad, but they are mediocre. 
Here and there the very careful reader may come 
across lines and phrases that display the concealed 
author of the Song to David, such as the following, 
from an excessively tiresome ode to Dr. Webster : 

When Israel' 's host, with all their stores, 

Passed through the ruby-tinctured crystal shores, 

The wilderness of waters and of land. 

But these are rare. His odes are founded upon 
those of Gray, and the best that can be said of them 
is that if they do not quite rise to the frozen elegance 
of Akenside, they seldom sink to the flaccidity of 
Mason. Never, for one consecutive stanza or stroke, 
do they approach Collins or Gray in delicacy or 
power. But the Song to David — the lyric in 516 
lines which Smart is so absurdly fabled to have 
scratched with a key on the white-washed walls of 
his cell — this was a portent of beauty and originality. 
Strange to say, it was utterly neglected when it 
appeared, and the editor of the 1791 edition of 
Smart's works expressly omitted to print it on the 
ground that it bore too many " melancholy proofs 
of the estrangement of Smart's mind " to be fit 
for republication. It became rare to the very verge 
of extinction, and is now scarcely to be found in its 
entirety save in a pretty reprint of 1819, itself now 
rare, due to the piety of a Rev. R. Harvey. 

It is obvious that Smart's contemporaries and 
immediate successors looked upon the Song to David 
as the work of a hopelessly deranged person. In 1763 
poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to. 



Smart's Poems 159 



The year preceding had welcomed the Shipwreck 
of Falconer, the year to follow would welcome 
Goldsmith's Traveller and Grainger's Sugar Cane, 
works of various merit, but all eminently sane. In 
1763 Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being 
born. The tidy, spruce, and discreet poetry of the 
eighteenth century was passing into its final and 
most pronounced stage. The Song to David, with its 
bold mention of unfamiliar things, its warm and 
highly-coloured phraseology, its daring adjectives 
and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon 
taste, and one which was best accounted for by the 
tap of the forefinger on the forehead. No doubt 
the poem presented and still may present legitimate 
difficulties. Here, for instance, is a stanza which 
it is not for those who run to read : 

Increasing days their reign exalt, 
Nor in the fink and mottled vault 

The opposing spirits tilt ; 
And, by the coasting reader spy'd, 
The silver lings and crusions glide 

For Adoration gilt. 

This is charming ; but if it were in one of the tongues 
of the heathen we should get Dr. Verrall to explain 
it away. Poor Mr. Harvey, the editor of 1819, 
being hopelessly puzzled by " silverings," the only 
dictionary meaning of which is " shekels," explained 
" crusions " to be some other kind of money, from 
KQovoiq, But " crusions are golden carp, and when 
I was a child the Devonshire fishermen used to call 
the long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper 
name, I think, is the launce) a silverling. The 
" coasting reader " is the courteous reader when 



160 Gossip in a Library 



walking along the coast, and what he sees are silver 
fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty 
of their scales. The Song to David is cryptic to a very 
high degree, but I think there are no lines in it which 
patient reflection will not solve. On every page are 
stanzas the verbal splendour of which no lover of 
poetry will question, and lines which will always, 
to me at least, retain an echo of that gusto with which 
I have heard Mr. Browning's strong voice recite 
them : 

The wealthy crops of whitening rice 
9 Mongst thyine woods and groves of spice. 

For Adoration grow ; 
And, mars hall 9 d in the fenced land, 
The peaches and pomegranates stand, 

Where wild carnations blow. 

The laurels with the winter strive ; 

The crocus burnishes alive 

Upon the snow- clad earth ; 
# # # # # 

For Adoration ripening canes 
And cocoa? s purest milk detains 

The westering pilgrim: } s staff ; 
Where rain in clasping boughs inclosed, 
And vines with oranges disposed, 

Embower the social laugh. 

For Adoration, beyond match, 
The scholar bulfinch aims to catch 

The soft flute 9 s ivory touch ; 
And, careless on the hazle spray, 
The daring redbreast keeps at bay 

The damsel 9 s greedy clutch. 

To quote at further length from so fascinating, so 
divine a poem, would be " purpling too much my 



Smart's Poems 



161 



mere grey argument.' ' Browning's praise ought 
to send every one to the original. But here is 
one more stanza that I cannot resist copying, 
because it seems so pathetically applicable to Smart 
himself as a man, and to the one exquisite poem which 
was " the more than Abishag of his age " : 

His muse, bright angel of his verse, 
Gives balm for all the thorns that fierce, 

For all the fangs that rage ; 
Blest light, still gaining on the gloom, 
The more than Michal of his bloom, 

The Abishag of his age. 



M 



POMPEY THE LITTLE 



POMPEY THE LITTLE 



The History of Pompey the Little ; or, the Life and Adventures of a 
Lap-Dog. London : Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster 
Row, MDCCLI. 

In February 1751 the town, which had been suffering 
from rather a dreary spell since the acceptable 
publication of Tom Jones, was refreshed and en- 
livened by the simultaneous issue of two delightfully 
scandalous productions, eminently well adapted 
to occupy the polite conversation of ladies at drums 
and at the card-table. Of these one was The 
Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, so oddly foisted by 
Smollett into the third volume of his Peregrine Pickle. 
This was recognised at once as being the work of 
the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom 
so many strange stories were already current in 
society. The other puzzled the gossips much longer, 
and it seems to have been the poet Gray who first 
discovered the authorship of Pompey the Little. 
Gray wrote to tell Horace Walpole who had written 
the anonymous book that everybody was talking 
about, adding that he had discovered the secret 
through the author's own carelessness, three of the 
characters being taken from a comedy shown him 
by a young clergyman at Magdalen College, Cam- 
bridge. This was the Rev. Francis Coventry, then 
some twenty-five years of age. The discovery of 
the authorship made Coventry a nine-days' hero, 

165 



1 66 Gossip in a Library 



while his book went into a multitude of editions. 
It was one of the most successful jeux d } esprit of 
the eighteenth century. 

The copy of the first edition of Pompey the Little, 
which lies before me, contains an excellent impression 
of the frontispiece by Louis Boitard, the fashionable 
engraver-designer, whose print of the Ranelagh 
Rotunda is so much sought after by amateurs. It 
represents a curtain drawn aside to reveal a velvet 
cushion, on which sits a graceful little Italian lap-dog 
with pendant silky ears and sleek sides spotted like 
the pard. This is Pompey the Little, whose life 
and adventures the book proceeds to recount. 
" Pompey, the son of Julio and Phyllis, was born 
a.d. 1735, at Bologna in Italy, a place famous for 
lap-dogs and sausages/' At an early age he was 
carried away from the boudoir of his Italian mistress 
by Hillario, an English gentleman illustrious for 
his gallantries, who brought him to London. The 
rest of the history is really a chain of social episodes, 
each closed by the incident that Pompey becomes 
the property of some fresh person. In this way we 
find ourselves in a dozen successive scenes, each 
strongly contrasted with the others. It is the art 
of the author that he knows exactly how much to 
tell us without wearying our attention, and is able 
to make the transition to the next scene a plausible 
one. 

There is low life as well as high life in Pompey 
the Little, sketches after Hogarth, no less than studies 
a la Watteau. But the high life is by far the better 
described. Francis Coventry was the cousin of 
the Earl of that name, he who married the beautiful 



Pompey the Little 167 



and silly Maria Gunning. When he painted the 
ladies of quality at their routs and drums, masque- 
rades, and hurly-burlies, he knew what he was 
talking about, for this was the life he himself led, 
when he was not at college. Even at Cambridge, 
he was under the dazzling influence of his famous 
and fashionable cousin, Henry Coventry, fellow of 
the same college of Magdalen, author of the polite 
Philemon to Hydaspes dialogues, and the latest person 
who dressed well in the University. The em- 
broidered coats of Henry Coventry, stiff with gold 
lace, his " most prominent Roman nose " and air 
of being much a gentleman, were not lost on the 
younger member of the family, who seems to paint 
him slyly in his portrait of Mr. Williams. 

The great charm of Pompey the Little to con- 
temporaries was, of course, the fact that it was 
supposed to be a roman a clef. The Countess of 
Bute hastened to send out a copy of it to her mother 
in Italy, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did not 
hesitate to discover the likenesses of various dear 
friends of hers. She found it impossible to go to bed 
till she had finished it. She was charmed, and she 
tells Lady Bute, what the curious may now read 
with great satisfaction, that it was " a real and 
exact representation of life, as it is now acted in 
London/' What is odd is that Lady Mary identified, 
with absolute complacency, the portrait of herself, 
as Mrs. Qualmsick, that hysterical lady with whom 
" it was not unusual for her to fancy herself a Glass 
bottle, a Tea-pot, a Hay-rick, or a Field of Turnips. " 
Instead of being angry, Lady Mary screamed with 
laughter at the satire of her own whimsies, of how 



1 68 Gossip in a Library 



" Red was too glaring for her eyes ; Green put her 
in Mind of Willows, and made her melancholic; 
Blue remembered her of her dear Sister, who had 
died ten Years before in a blue Bed/' In fact, 
all this fun seems, for the moment at least, to have 
cured the original Mrs. Qualmsick of her whimsies, 
and her remarks on Pompey the Little are so good- 
natured that we may well forgive her for the pleasure 
with which she recognised Lady Townshend in 
Lady Tempest and the Countess of Orford in the 
pedantic and deistical Lady Sophister, who rates 
the physicians for their theology, and will not be 
bled by any man who accepts the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul. 

Coventry's romance does not deserve the entire 
neglect into which it has fallen. It is sprightly and 
graceful from the first page to the last. Not written, 
indeed, by a man of genius, it is yet the work of a 
very refined observer, who had been modern enough 
to catch the tone of the new school of novelists. 
The writer owes much to Fielding, who yet does not 
escape without a flap from one of Pompey's silken 
ears. Coventry's manner may be best exemplified 
by one of his own bright passages of satire. This 
notion of a man of quality, that no place can be full 
that is not crowded with people of fashion, is not new, 
but it is deliciously expressed. Aurora has come 
back from Bath, and assures the Count that she has 
had a pleasant season there : 

" ' You amaze me," cries the Count ; ' Impossible, 
Madam ! How can it be, Ladies ? I had Letters 
from Lord Monkeyman and Lady Betty Scornful 
assuring me that, except yourselves, there were not 



Pompey the Little 



169 



three human Creatures in the Place. Let me see, 
I have Lady Betty s Letter in my Pocket, I believe, 
at this Moment. Oh no, upon Recollection, I put 
it this morning into my Cabinet, where I preserve 
all my Letters of Quality/ Aurora, smothering 
a Laugh as well as she could, said she was extremely 
obliged to Lord Monkeyman and Lady Betty , for 
vouchsafing to rank her and her Sister in the Cata- 
logue of human Beings. ' But, surely/ added she, 
' they must have been asleep, both of them, when 
they wrote their Letters ; for the Bath was extremely 
full/ 'Full!' cries the Count, interrupting her; 
" Oh, Madam, that is very possible, and yet there 
might be no Company — that is, none of us; No- 
body that one knows. For as to all the Tramontanes 
that come by the cross Post, we never reckon them 
as anything but Monsters in human Shape, that 
serve to fill up the Stage of Life, like Cyphers in a 
play. For Instance, you often see an awkward Girl, 
who has sewed a Tail to a Gown, and pinned two Lap- 
pits to a Night-cap, come running headlong into the 
Rooms with a wild, frosty Face, as if she was just 
come from feeding Poultry in her Father's Chicken- 
Yard. Or you see a Booby Squire, with a Head 
resembling a Stone ball over a Gate-post. Now, 
it would be the most ridiculous Thing in Life to call 
such People Company. 'Tis the Want of Titles, 
and not the Want of Faces, that makes a Place 
empty/ " 

There are indications, which I think have escaped 
the notice of Goldsmith's editors, that the author 
of the Citizen of the World condescended to take some 
of his ideas from Pompey the Little, In Count Tag, 



170 



Gossip in a Library 



the impoverished little fop who fancies himself a 
man of quality, and who begs pardon of people 
who accost him in the Park — " but really, Lady 
Betty or Lady Mary is just entering the Mall," — 
we have the direct prototype of Beau Tibbs ; while 
Mr. Rhymer, the starving poet, whose furniture 
consists of " the first Act of a Comedy, a Pair of 
yellow Stays, two political Pamphlets, a plate of 
Bread-and-butter, three dirty Night-caps, and a 
Volume of Miscellany Poems/' is a figure wonderfully 
like that of Goldsmith himself, as Dr. Percy found 
him eight years later, in that " wretched, dirty 
room," at the top of Breakneck Steps, Green Arbour 
Court. The whole conception of that Dickens-like 
scene, in which it is described how Lady Frippery 
had a drum in spite of all local difficulties, is much 
more in the humour of Goldsmith than in that of 
any of Coventry's immediate contemporaries. 

Strangely enough, in spite of the great success of 
his one book, the author of Pompey the Little never 
tried to repeat it. He became perpetual curate of 
Edgware, and died in the neighbouring village of 
Stanmore Parva a few years after the publication 
of his solitary book; I have, however, searched 
the registers of that parish in vain for any record 
of the fact. Francis Coventry had gifts of wit and 
picturesqueness which deserved a better fate than 
to amuse a few dissipated women over their citron- 
waters, and then to be forgotten. 



THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNCLE 



THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNCLE 



The Life of John Buncle, Esq., containing various observations and reflections 
made in several parts of the ivorld and many extraordinary relations. 
London : Printed for J. Noon, at the White Hart in Cheapside, near the 
Poultry, MDCCLVL 

[Vol. II. London : Printed for J. Johnson and B. Davenport, at the 
Globe, in Pater Noster Row, MDCCLXVI.'] 

In the year 1756, there resided in the Barbican, 
where the great John Milton had lived before him, 
a funny elderly personage called Mr. Thomas Amory, 
of whom not nearly so much is recorded as the lovers 
of literary anecdote would like to possess. He 
was sixty-five years of age ; he was an Irish gentle- 
man of means, and he was an ardent Unitarian. 
Some unkind people have suggested that he was out 
of his mind, and he had, it is certain, many pecu- 
liarities. One was, that he never left his house, 
or ventured into the streets, save " like a bat, in 
the dusk of the evening/' He was, in short, what 
is called a " crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. 
He desired that it might be written on his tombstone, 
" Here lies an Odd Man/' For sixty years he had 
made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 
1755 he had published a sort of romance, called 
Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, and now 
he succeeded it by the truly extraordinary work, 
the name of which stands at the head of this article. 
Ten years later there would appear another volume 
of John Buncle, and then Amory disappeared again. 

173 



174 Gossip in a Library 



All we know is, that he died in 1788, at the very 
respectable age of ninety-seven. So little is known 
about him, so successfully did he hide " like a bat " 
through the dusk of nearly a century, that we may 
be glad to eke out the scanty information given 
above by a passage of autobiography from the pre- 
face of the book before us : 

" I was born in London, and carried an infant 
to Ireland, where I learned the Irish language, 
and became intimately acquainted with its original 
inhabitants. I was not only a lover of books from 
the time I could spell them to this hour, but read 
with an extraordinary pleasure, before I was twenty, 
the works of several of the Fathers, and all the old 
romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain 
piety and extravagance that rendered my virtues 
as well as my imperfections particularly mine. . . . 
The dull, the formal, and the visionary, the hard- 
honest man, and the poor-liver, are a people I have 
had no connection with; but have always kept 
company with the polite, the generous, the lively, 
the rational, and the brightest freethinkers of this 
age. Besides all this, I was in the days of my youth, 
one of the most active men in the world at every 
exercise ; and to a degree of rashness, often venture- 
some, when there was no necessity for running any 
hazards; in diebus Mis, I have descended head- 
foremost, from a high cliff into the ocean, to swim, 
when I could, and ought, to have gone off a rock 
not a yard from the surface of the deep. I have 
swam near a mile and a half out in the sea to a ship 
that lay off, gone on board, got clothes from the 



The Life of John Buncle 175 



mate of the vessel, and proceeded with them to the 
next port ; while my companion I left on the beach 
concluded me drowned, and related my sad fate in 
the town. I have taken a cool thrust over a bottle, 
without the least animosity on either side, but both 
of us depending on our skill in the small sword for 
preservation from mischief. Such things as these 
I now call wrong." 

If this is not a person of whom we would like 
to know more, I know not what the romance of 
biography is. Thomas Amory 's life must have 
been a streak of crimson on the grey surface of the 
eighteenth century. It is really a misfortune that 
the red is almost all washed off. 

No odder book than John Buncle was published 
in England throughout the long life of Amory. 
Romances there were, like Gulliver s Travels and 
Peter Wilkins, in which the incidents were much 
more incredible, but there was no supposition that 
these would be treated as real history. The curious 
feature of John Buncle is that the story is told with 
the strictest attention to realism and detail, and yet 
is embroidered all over with the impossible. There 
can be no doubt that Amory, who belonged to an 
older school, was affected by the form of the new 
novels which were the fashion in 1756. He wished 
to be as particular as Mr. Richardson, as manly 
as Captain Fielding, as breezy and vigorous as Dr. 
Smollett, the three new writers who were all the 
talk of the town. But there was a twist in his brain 
which made his pictures of real life appear like scenes 
looked at through flawed glass. 



176 



Gossip in a Library 



The memoirs of John Buncle take the form of an 
autobiography, and there has been much discussion 
as to how much is, and how much is not, the personal 
history of Amory. I confess I cannot see why we 
should not suppose all of it to be invented, although 
it certainly is odd to relate anecdotes and impressions 
of Dr. Swift, a propos of nothing at all, unless they 
formed part of the author's experience. For one 
thing, the hero is represented as being born about 
thirteen years later than Amory was — if, indeed, 
we possess the true date of our worthy's birth. 
Buncle goes to college and becomes an earnest 
Unitarian. The incidents of his life are all intel- 
lectual, until one " glorious first of August," when 
he sallies forth from college with his gun and dog, 
and after four hours' walk discovers that he has 
lost his way. He is in the midst of splendid moun- 
tain scenery — which leads us to wonder at which 
English University he was studying — and descends 
through woody ravines and cliffs that overhang 
torrents, till he suddenly comes in sight of a " little 
harmonic building that had every charm and pro- 
portion architecture could give it." Finding one 
of the garden doors open, and being very hungry, 
the adventurous Buncle strolls in, and finds himself 
in " a grotto or shell-house, in which a politeness of 
fancy had produced and blended the greatest 
beauties of nature and decoration." (There are 
more grottoes in the pages of Amory than exist in 
the whole of the British Islands.) This shell-house 
opened into a library, and in the library a beauteous 
object was sitting and reading. She was studying 



The Life of John Buncle 177 



a Hebrew Bible, and making philological notes on a 
small desk. She raised her eyes and approached 
the stranger, " to know who I wanted " (for Buncle's 
style, though picturesque, is not always grammatic- 
ally irreproachable.) 

Before he could answer, a venerable gentleman 
was at his side, to whom the young sportsman con- 
fessed that he was dying of hunger and had lost his 
way. Mr. Noel, a patriarchal widower of vast 
wealth, was inhabiting this mansion in the sole 
company of his only daughter, the lovely being just 
referred to. Mr. Buncle was immediately " stiffened 
by enchantment " at the beauty of Miss Harriot 
Noel, and could not be induced to leave when he 
had eaten his breakfast. This difficulty was removed 
by the old gentleman asking him to stay to dinner, 
until the time of which meal Miss Noel should enter- 
tain him. At about 10 a.m. Mr. Buncle offers his 
hand to the astonished Miss Noel, who, with great 
propriety, bids him recollect that he is an entire 
stranger to her. They then have a long conversa- 
tion about the Chaldeans, and the " primaevity " 
of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary 
longevity of the Antediluvians ; at the close of which 
(circa 11.15 a.m.) Buncle proposes again. " You 
force me to smile (the illustrious Miss Noel replied), 
and oblige me to call you an odd compound of a man," 
and to distract his thoughts, she takes him round 
her famous grotto. The conversation, all repeated 
at length, turns on conchology and on the philosophy 
of Epictetus until it is time for dinner, when Mr. 
Noel and young Buncle drink a bottle of old Alicant, 

N 



178 Gossip in a Library 



and discuss the gallery of Verres and the poetry of 
Catullus. Left alone at last, Buncle still does not 
go away, but at 5 p.m. proposes for the third time, 
" over a pot of tea." Miss Noel says that the con- 
versation will have to take some other turn, or she 
must leave the room. They therefore immediately 
" consider the miracle at Babel," and the argument 
of Hutchinson on the Hebrew word Shephah, until, 
while Miss Noel is in the very act of explaining that 
" the Aramitish was the customary language of 
the line of Shem," young Buncle (circa 7.30) " could 
not help snatching this beauty to my arms, and with- 
out thinking what I did, impressed on her balmy 
mouth half a dozen kisses. This was wrong, and 
gave offence," but then papa returning, the trio sat 
down peacefully to cribbage and a little music. 
Of course Miss Noel is ultimately won, and this is 
a very fair specimen of the conduct of the book. 

A fortnight before the marriage, however, " the 
small-pox steps in, and in seven days' time reduced 
the finest human frame in the universe to the most 
hideous and offensive block," and Miss Harriot 
Noel dies. If this dismal occurrence is rather 
abruptly introduced, it is because Buncle has to be 
betrothed, in succession, to six other lively and 
delicious young females, all of them beautiful, all 
of them learned, and all of them earnestly convinced 
Unitarians. If they did not rapidly die off, how 
could they be seven ? Buncle mourns the decease 
of each, and then hastily forms an equally violent 
attachment to another. It must be admitted that 
he is a sad wife-waster. Azora is one of the most 



The Life of John Buncle 179 



delightful of these deciduous loves. She " had an 
amazing collection of the most rational philosophical 
ideas, and she delivered them in the most pleasing 
dress." She resided in a grotto within a romantic 
dale in Yorkshire, in a " little female republic " 
of one hundred souls, all of them " straight, clean, 
handsome girls." In this glen there is only one 
man, and he a fossil. Miss Melmoth, who would 
discuss the paulo-post futurum of a Greek verb with 
the utmost care and politeness, and had studied 
" the Minerva of Sanctius and Hickes' Northern 
Thesaurus," was another nice young lady, though 
rather free in her manner with gentlemen. But 
they ail die, sacrificed to the insatiable fate of 
Buncle. 

Here the reader may like to enjoy a sample of 
Buncle as a philosopher. It is a characteristic 
passage : 

" Such was the soliloquy I spoke, as I gazed on 
the skeleton of John Orton ; and just as I had ended, 
the boys brought in the wild turkey, which they had 
very ingeniously roasted, and with some of Mrs. 
Burcot's fine ale and bread, I had an excellent supper. 
The bones of the penitent Orton I removed to a hole 
I had ordered my lad to dig for them; the skull 
excepted, which I kept, and still keep on my table 
for a memento mori ; and that I may never forget 
the good lesson which the percipient who once 
resided in it had given. It is often the subject of 
my meditation. When I am alone of an evening, 
in my closet, which is often my case, I have the skull 
of John Orton before me, and as I smoke a philosophic 

N 2 



i8o 



Gossip in a Library- 



pipe, with my eyes fastened on it, I learn more from 
the solemn object than I could from the most 
philosophical and laboured speculations. What a 
wild and hot head once — how cold and still now; 
poor skull, I say : and what was the end of all thy 
daring, frolics and gambols — thy licentiousness and 
impiety — a severe and bitter repentance. In piety 
and goodness John Orton found at last that happi- 
ness the world could not give him." 

Hazlitt has said that " the soul of Rabelais passed 
into John Amory." His name was Thomas, not 
John, and there is very little that is Rabelaisian in 
his spirit. One sees what Hazlitt meant — the 
voluble and diffuse learning, the desultory thread 
of narration, the mixture of religion and animalism. 
But the resemblance is very superficial, and the 
parallel too complimentary to Amory. It is diffi- 
cult to think of the soul of Rabelais in connection 
with a pedantic and uxorious Unitarian. To lovers 
of odd books, John Buncle will always have a genuine 
attraction. Its learning would have dazzled Dr. 
Primrose, and is put on in glittering spars and shells, 
like the ornaments of the many grottoes that it 
describes. It is diversified by descriptions of natural 
scenery, which are often exceedingly felicitous 
and original, and it is quickened by the human 
warmth and flush of the love passages, which, with 
all their quaintness, are extremely human. It is 
essentially a " healthy " book, as Charles Lamb, 
with such a startling result, assured the Scotchman. 
Amory was a fervid admirer of womankind, and 
he favoured a rare type, the learned lady who bears 



The Life of John Buncle 1 8 1 



her learning lightly and can discuss " the quadra- 
tions of curvilinear spaces " without ceasing to be 
" a bouncing, dear, delightful girl," and adroit in the 
preparation of toast and chocolate. The style of 
the book is very careless and irregular, but rises in 
its best pages to an admirable picturesqueness. 



BEAU NASH 



BEAU NASH 



The Life of Richard Nash, Esq. ; late Master of the Ceremonies at Bath. 
Extracted principally from his Original Papers. The Second Edition. 
London : J. Neivbery. 1762. 

There are cases, not known to every collector of 
books, where it is not the first which is the really 
desirable edition of a work, but the second. One of 
these rare examples of the exception which proves 
the rule is the second edition of Goldsmith's Life of 
Beau Nash. Disappointment awaits him who 
possesses only the first ; it is in the second that the 
best things originally appeared. The story is 
rather to be divined than told as history, but we can 
see pretty plainly how the lines of it must have run. 
In the early part of 1762, Oliver Goldsmith, at that 
time still undistinguished, but in the very act of 
blossoming into fame, received a commission of 
fourteen guineas to write for Newbery a life of 
the strange old beau, Mr. Nash, who had died 
in 1761. On the same day, which was March 5th, 
he gave a receipt to the publisher for three 
other publications, written or to be written, so 
that very probably it was not expected that he 
should immediately supply all the matter sold. In 
the summer he seems to have gone down to Bath on 
a short visit, and to have made friends with the 
Beau's executor, Mr. George Scott. It has even 

185 



i86 



Gossip in a Library 



been said that he cultivated the Mayor and Alder- 
men of Bath with such success that they presented 
him with yet another fifteen guineas. But of this, 
in itself highly improbable, instance of municipal 
benefaction, the archives of the city yield no proof. 
At least Mr. Scott gave him access to Nash's papers, 
and with these he seems to have betaken himself 
back to London. 

It is a heart-rending delusion and a cruel snare 
to be paid for your work before you accomplish it. 
As soon as once your work is finished you ought to 
be promptly paid; but to receive your lucre one 
minute before it is due, is to tempt Providence to 
make a Micawber of you. Goldsmith, of course, 
without any temptation being needed, was the very 
ideal Micawber of letters, and the result of paying 
him beforehand was that he had, simply, to be 
popped into the mill by force, and the copy ground 
out of him. It is evident that in the case of the 
first edition of the Life of Beau Nash, the grinding 
process was too mercifully applied, and the book 
when it appeared was short measure. It has no 
dedication, no " advertisement/' and very few notes, 
while it actually omits many of the best stories. 
The wise bibliophile, therefore, will eschew it, and 
will try to get the second edition issued a few weeks 
later in the same year, which Newbery evidently 
insisted that Goldsmith should send out to the 
public in proper order. 

Goldsmith treats Nash with very much the same 
sort of indulgent and apologetic sympathy with which 
the late M. Barbey d'Aurevilly treats Brummell. 
He does not affect to think that the world calls for 



Beau Nash 



i8 7 



a full-length statue of such a fantastic hero ; but he 
seems to claim leave to execute a statuette in terra- 
cotta for a cabinet of curiosities. From that point of 
view, as a queer object of vertu, as a specimen of the 
bric-a-brac of manners, both the one and the other, 
the King of Beaux and the Emperor of Dandies, are 
welcome to amateurs of the odd and the entertain- 
ing. At the head of Goldsmith's book stands a fine 
portrait of Nash, engraved by Anthony Walker, one 
of the best and rarest of early English line-engravers, 
after an oil-picture by William Hoare, presently to 
be one of the foundation-members of the Royal 
Academy, and now and throughout his long life the 
principal representative of the fine arts at Bath. 
Nash is here represented in his famous white hat — 
galero albo, as his epitaph has it ; the ensign of his 
rule at Bath, the more than coronet of his social 
sway. 

The breast of his handsome coat is copiously 
trimmed with rich lace, and his old, old eyes, with 
their wrinkles and their crow's feet, look demurely 
out from under an incredible wig, an umbrageous, 
deep-coloured ramilie of early youth. It is a 
wonderfully hard-featured, serious, fatuous face, 
and it lives for us under the delicate strokes of 
Anthony Walker's graver. The great Beau looks 
as he must have looked when the Duchess of Queens- 
berry dared to appear at the Assembly House on a 
ball night with a white apron on. It is a pleasant 
story, and only told properly in our second edition. 
King Nash had issued an edict forbidding the wearing 
of aprons. The Duchess dared to disobey. Nash 
walked up to her and deftly snatched her apron from 



i88 



Gossip in a Library 



her, throwing it on to the back benches where the 
ladies' women sat. What a splendid moment ! 
Imagine the excitement of all that fashionable 
company — the drawn battle between the Majesty of 
Etiquette and the Majesty of Beauty ! The Beau 
remarked, with sublime calm, that " none but 
Abigails appeared in white aprons/ ' The Duchess 
hesitated, felt that her ground had slipped from 
under her, gave way with the most admirable 
tact, and " with great good sense and humour, 
begged his Majesty's pardon." 

Aprons were not the only red rags to the bull of 
ceremony. He was quite as unflinching an enemy 
to top-boots. He had already banished swords 
from the assembly-room, because their clash 
frightened the ladies, and their scabbards tore 
people's dresses. But boots were not so easily 
banished. The country squires liked to ride into 
the city, and, leaving their horses at a stable, walk 
straight into the dignity of the minuet. Nash, who 
had a genius for propriety, saw how hateful this was, 
and determined to put a stop to it. He slew top- 
boots and aprons at the same time, and with the 
shaft of Apollo. He indited a poem on the occasion, 
and a very good example of satire by irony it is. 
It is short enough to quote entire : 

FRONTINELLA'S INVITATION TO THE ASSEMBLY. 

Come, one and all, 

To Hoyden Hall, 
For there's tV Assembly to-night. 

None but frude fools 

Mind manners and rules, 
We Hoydens do decency slight. 



Beau Nash 



189 



Come, Trollops and Slatterns, 

Cocked hats and white aprons, 
This best our modesty suits ; 

For why should not we 

In dress be as jree 
As Hogs-Norton squires in boots P 

Why, indeed ? But the Hogs-Norton squires, as 
is their wont, were not so easily pierced to the heart 
as the noble slatterns. Nash turned Aristophanes, 
and depicted on a little stage a play in which Mr. 
Punch, under very disgraceful circumstances, ex- 
cused himself for wearing boots by quoting the 
practice of the pump-room beaux. This seems to 
have gone to the conscience of Hogs-Norton at 
last; but what really gave the death-blow to top- 
boots, as a part of evening dress, was the incident 
of Nash's going up to a gentleman, who had made 
his appearance in the ball-room in this unpardonable 
costume, and remarking, " bowing in an arch 
manner," that he appeared to have " forgotten his 
horse." 

It had not been without labour and a long 
struggle that Nash had risen to this position of 
unquestioned authority at Bath. His majestic rule 
was the result of more than half a century of pains- 
taking. He had been born far back in the seven- 
teenth century, so far back that, incredible as it 
sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had 
supplied Vanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his 
comedy of Msop. But after trying many forms of 
life, and weary of his own affluence, he came to Bath 
just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient 
centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb. 
Queen Anne had been obliged to divert herself, in 



190 Gossip in a Library 



1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy, and with country 
dances on the bowling-green. The lodgings were 
dingy and expensive, the pump-house had no 
director, the nobility had haughtily withdrawn from 
such vulgar entertainments as the city now alone 
afforded. The famous and choleric physician, Dr. 
Radcliffe, in revenge for some slight he had endured, 
had threatened to " throw a toad into King Bladud's 
Well," by writing a pamphlet against the medicinal 
efficacy of the waters. 

The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, 
which had been slowly declining since the days of 
Elizabeth, was threatened with extinction when 
Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius 
for organisation, and in half a century he made it 
what he left it when he died in his eighty-ninth year, 
the most elegant and attractive of the smaller social 
resorts of Europe. Such a man, let us be certain, 
was not wholly ridiculous. There must have been 
something more in him than in a mere idol of the 
dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistible buck 
and lady-killer, like Lauzun. In these latter men 
the force is wholly destructive; they are animated 
by a feline vanity, a tiger-spirit of egotism. Against 
the story of Nash and the Duchess of Queensberry, 
so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful 
anecdote that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting 
the hand of another duchess under his high heel, and 
pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper into 
the flesh. In all the repertory of Nash's extravag- 
ances there is not one story of this kind, not one 
that reveals a wicked force. He was fatuous, but 
beneficent ; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt. 



Beau Nash 



191 



Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has 
taken more pains with his life of Nash than he ever 
took again in a biography. His Parnell, his Boling- 
broke, his Voltaire, are not worthy of his name and 
fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever 
make them more than they were at first — pot- 
boilers, turned out with no care or enthusiasm, and 
unconscientiously prepared. But this subtle figure 
of a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old pre- 
sentment of a pump-room king, crowned with a 
white hat, waiting all day long in his best at the 
bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a 
bow from that other, and alas ! better accredited 
royalty, the Prince of Wales ; this picture, of an old 
beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, his 
agate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded 
jokes and blunted stories — all this had something 
very attractive to Goldsmith both in its humour and 
its pathos ; and he has left us, in his Life of Nash, a 
study which is far too little known, but which 
deserves to rank among the best-read productions 
of that infinitely sympathetic pen, which has be- 
queathed to posterity Mr. Tibbs and Moses Primrose 
and Tony Lumpkin. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 
SELBORNE 



O 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 
SELBORNE 

The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County 
of Southampton ; with Engravings, and an Appendix. London : 
Printed by T. Bensley, for B. JVhite and Son, at Horace's Head, Fleet 
Street. MDCCLXXXIX. 

It is not always the most confidently conducted 
books, or those best preceded by blasts on the public 
trumpet, which are eventually received with highest 
honours into the palace of literature. No more 
curious incident of this fact is to be found than is 
presented by the personal history of that enchant- 
ing classic, White's Selborne. If ever an author 
hesitated and reflected, dipped his toe into the bath 
of publicity, and hastily withdrew it again, loitered 
on the brink and could not be induced to plunge, it 
was the Rev. Gilbert White. This man of singular 
genius was not to be persuaded that the town would 
tolerate his lucubrations. He was ready to make 
a present of them to any one who would father them, 
he allowed his life to slip by until his seventieth year 
was reached, before he would print them, and when 
they appeared, he could not find the courage to put 
his name on the title-page. Not one of his own 
titlarks or sedge-warblers could be more shy of 
public observation. Even the fact that his own 
brother was a publisher gave him no real confidence 
in printers' ink. 

o 2 195 



196 Gossip in a Library 



Gilbert White was already a middle-aged man 
when he was drawn into correspondence by Thomas 
Pennant, a naturalist younger than himself, who 
had undertaken to produce, in four volumes folio, a 
work on British Zoology for the production of which 
he was radically unfitted. It has been severely, 
but justly, pointed out that wherever Pennant rises 
superior, either in style or information, to his own 
dead level of pompous inexactitude, he is almost 
certainly quoting from a letter of Gilbert White's. 
Yet no acknowledgment of the Selborne parson is 
vouchsafed; " even in the account of the harvest- 
mouse/' says Professor Bell, " there is no mention of 
its discoverer/ ' Nevertheless, so rudimentary was 
scientific knowledge one hundred and thirty years 
ago, that Pennant's pretentious book was received 
with acclamation. The patient man at Selborne 
sat and smiled, even courteously joining with mild 
congratulations in the rounds of applause. Fortu- 
nately Pennant did not remain his only correspon- 
dent. The Hon. Daines Barrington was a man of 
another stamp, not profound, indeed, but enthusias- 
tic, a genuine lover of research, and a gentleman at 
heart. He quoted Gilbert White in his writings, 
but never without full acknowledgment. Other 
friends followed, and the recluse of Selbourne became 
the correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, of Dr. 
Chandler, and of many other great ones of that day 
now decently forgotten. 

Meanwhile, he was growing old. Any sharp 
winter might have cut him off, as he trudged along 
through the deep lanes of his rustic parish. Early in 
1770 Daines Barrington, tired of seeing his friend the 



The Natural History of Selborne 197 



mere valet to so many other pompous intellects, had 
proposed to him to u draw up an account of the 
animals of Selborne." Gilbert White put the 
fascinating notion from him. "It is no small 
undertaking/' he replied, "for a man unsupported 
and alone to begin a natural history from his own 
autopsia." Pennant seems to have joined in the 
suggestion of Barrington, for White says (in a letter, 
dated July 19, 1771, which did not see the light for 
more than a century after it was written) : 

"As to any publication in this way of my own, 
I look upon it with great diffidence, finding that I 
ought to have begun it twenty years ago ; but if 
I was to attempt anything, it should be something 
of a Nat : history of my native parish, an Annus 
historico-naturalis, comprising a journal of one whole 
year, and illustrated with large notes and observa- 
tions. Such a beginning might induce more able 
naturalists to write the history of various districts, 
and might in time occasion the production of a work 
so much to be wished for, a full and compleat nat : 
history of these kingdoms/ ' 

Three years later he was still thinking of doing 
something, but putting off the hour of action. In 
1776 he was suddenly spurred to decide by the cir- 
cumstance that Barrington had written to propose 
a joint work on natural history. " If I publish at 
all," said Gilbert White to his nephew, " I shall come 
forth by myself." In 1780 he is still unready : 
" Were it not for want of a good amanuensis, I think 
I should make more progress." He was now sixty 
years of age. Eight years later he was preparing 
the Index, and at last, in the autumn of 1789, the 



198 Gossip in a Library 



volume positively made its appearance, in the maiden 
author's seventieth year. Few indeed, if any, among 
English writers of high distinction, have been con- 
tent to delay so long before testing the popular 
estimate of their work. His book was warmly 
welcomed, but the delightful author survived its 
publication less than four years, dying in the parish 
which he was to make so famous. Gilbert White 
was, in a very peculiar sense, a man of one book. 

Countless as have been the reprints of The 
Natural History of Selborne, its original form is no 
longer, perhaps, familiar to many readers. The 
first edition, which is now before me, is a very hand- 
some quarto. Benjamin White, the publisher, who 
was the younger brother of Gilbert, issued most of 
the standard works on natural history which appeared 
in London during the second half of the century, and 
his experience enabled him to do adequate justice to 
The History of Selborne. The frontispiece is a large 
folding plate of the village from the Short Lythe, an 
ambitious summer landscape, representing the 
church, White's own house, and a few cottages 
against the broad sweep of the hangar. On a 
terrace in the foreground are portrait figures of three 
gentlemen standing, and a lady seated. Of the 
former, one is a clergyman, and it has often been 
stated that this is Gilbert White himself; errone- 
ously, since no portrait of him was ever executed ; x 
the figure is that of the Rev. Robert Yalden, vicar 
of Newt on- Valence. The frontispiece is unsigned, 
and I find no record of the artist's name. It is not 

1 That discovered in 19 13 has yet to prove that it repre- 
sents Gilbert White in any way. 



The Natural History of Selborne 199 



to be doubted, however, that the original was 
painted by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, the Swiss 
water-colour draughtsman, who sketched so many 
topographical views in the South of England. 

The remaining illustrations to this first edition, 
are an oval landscape vignette on the title-page, 
engraved by Daniel Lerpiniere ; a full-page plate of 
some fossil shells; an extra-sized plate of the 
himantopus that was shot at Frensham Pond, 
straddling with an immense excess of shank; and 
four engravings, now of remarkable interest, dis- 
playing the village as it then stood, from various 
points of view. They are engraved by Peter Mazell, 
after drawings of Grimm's, and give what is evidently 
a most accurate impression of what Selborne was 
a century ago. In these days of reproductions, it is 
rather strange that no publisher has issued facsimiles 
of these beautiful illustrations to the original 
edition of what has become one of the most popular 
English works. For the use of book-collectors, I 
may go on to say that any one who is offered a copy 
of the edition of The History of Selborne of 1789, 
should be careful to see that not merely the plates I 
have mentioned are in their places, but that the 
engraved sub-title, with a print of the seal of Sel- 
borne Priory, occurs opposite the blank leaf which 
answers to page 306. 

It is impossible for a bibliographer who writes on 
Gilbert White to resist the pleasure of mentioning 
the name of his best editor and biographer. It was 
unfortunate that Thomas Bell, who was born eight 
months before the death of Gilbert White, and who 
quite early in life began to entertain an enthusiastic 



2oo Gossip in a Library 



reverence for that writer, did not find an opportunity 
of studying Selborne on the spot until the memories 
of White were becoming very vague and scattered 
there. I think it was not until about 1865 that, 
retiring from a professional career, he made Selborne 
— and the Wakes, the very house of Gilbert White — 
his residence. Here he lived, however, for fifteen 
years, and here it was his delight to follow up every 
vestige of the great naturalist's sojourn in the parish. 
White became the passion of Professor Bell's exist- 
ence, and I well recollect him when he was eighty- 
five or eighty-six years of age, and no longer strong 
enough in body to quit his room with ease, sitting 
in his arm-chair at the bedroom window, and direct- 
ing my attention to points of Whiteish interest, as 
I stood in the garden below. It was as difficult for 
Mr. Bell to conceive that his annotations of White 
were complete, as it had been for White himself to 
pluck up courage to publish; and it was not until 
1877, when the author was eighty-five years of age, 
that his great and final edition in two thick volumes 
was issued. He lived, however, to be nearly ninety, 
and died in the Wakes at last, in the very room, and 
if I mistake not, the very spot in the room, where his 
idol had passed away in 1793. 

As long as Professor Bell was alive the house 
preserved, in all essentials, the identical character 
which it had maintained under its famous tenant. 
Overgrown with creepers to the very chimneys, 
divided by the greenest and most velvety of lawns 
from a many-coloured furnace of flower-beds, 
scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intense 
green wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always 



The Natural History of Selborne 201 



retained for my memory an impression of rural 
fecundity and summer glow absolutely unequalled. 
The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with 
crimson stars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, 
I believe, has since then been altered. Selborne, 
they tell me, has ceased to bear any resemblance 
to that rich nest in which Thomas Bell so piously 
guarded the idea of Gilbert White. If it be so, we 
must live content with 



The memory of what has been, 
And never more may be. 



THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF 
LITERATURE 



THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF 
LITERATURE 

Extracts prom the Diary of a Lover of Literature. Ipswich: 
Printed and sold by John Raiv sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and 
Orme, Paternoster Roiv, London. 1810. 

It may be that, save by a few elderly people and 
certain lovers of old Gentleman's Mazagines, the 
broad anonymous quarto known as The Diary of a 
Lover of Literature is no longer much admired or 
even recollected. But it deserves to be recalled to 
memory, if only in that it was, in some respects, 
the first, and in others, the last of a long series of 
publications. It was the first of those diaries of 
personal record of the intellectual life, which have 
become more and more the fashion and have cul- 
minated at length in the ultra-refinement of Amiel 
and the conscious self-analysis of Marie Bashkirtseff. 
It was less definitely, perhaps, the last, or one of the 
last, expressions of the eighteenth century sentiment, 
undiluted by any tincture of romance, any suspicion 
that fine literature existed before Dryden, or could 
take any form unknown to Burke. 

It was under a strict incognito that The Diary of 
a Lover of Literature appeared, and it was attributed 
by conjecture to various famous people. The real 
author, however, was not a celebrated man. His 
name was Thomas Green, and he was the grandson 

205 



206 Gossip in a Library 



of a wealthy Suffolk soap-boiler, who had made a 
fortune during the reign of Queen Anne. The 
Diarist's father had been an agreeable amateur in 
letters, a pamphleteer, and a champion of the Church 
of England against Dissent. Thomas Green, who 
was born in 1769, found himself at twenty-five in 
possession of the ample family estates, a library of 
good books, a vast amount of leisure, and a heredi- 
tary faculty for reading. His health was not very 
solid, and he was debarred by it from sharing the 
pleasures of his neighbour squires. He determined 
to make books and music the occupation of his life, 
and in 1796, on his twenty-seventh birthday, he 
began to record in a diary his impressions of what he 
read. He went on very quietly and luxuriantly, 
living among his books in his house at Ipswich, and 
occasionally rolling in his post-chaise to valetudi- 
narian baths and " Spaws." 

When he had kept his diary for fourteen years, it 
seemed to a pardonable vanity so amusing, that he 
persuaded himself to give part of it to the world. 
The experiment, no doubt, was a very dubious one. 
After much hesitation, and in an evil hour, perhaps, 
he wrote : " I am induced to submit to the indul- 
gence of the public the idlest work, probably, that 
ever was composed ; but, I could wish to hope, not 
absolutely the most unentertaining or unprofitable/ ' 
The welcome his volume received must speedily have 
reassured him, but he had pledged himself to print 
no more, and he kept his promise, though he went 
on writing his Diary until he died in 1825. His 
MSS. passed into the hands of John Mitford, who 
amused the readers of The Gentleman's Magazine 



The Diary of a Lover of Literature 207 



with fragments of them for several years. Green 
has had many admirers in the past, amongst whom 
Edward FitzGerald was not the least distinguished. 
But he was always something of a local worthy, 
author of one anonymous book, and of late he 
has been little mentioned outside the confines of 
Suffolk. 

It would be difficult to find an example more 
striking than the Diary of a Lover of Literature of 
exclusive absorption in the world of books. It 
opens in a gloomy year for British politics, but there 
is found no allusion to current events. There is a 
victory off Cape St. Vincent in February, 1797, but 
Green is attacking Bentley's annotations on Horace. 
Bonaparte and his army are buried in the sands of 
Egypt; our Diarist takes occasion to be buried in 
Shaftesbury's Enquiry Concerning Virtue. Europe 
rings with Hohenlinden, but the news does not reach 
Mr. Thomas Green, nor disturb him in his perusal 
of Soame Jenyns' View of Christianity. The frag- 
ment of the Diary here preserved runs from Sep- 
tember 1796 to June 1800. No one would guess, 
from any word between cover and cover, that these 
were not halcyon years, an epoch of complete 
European tranquillity. War upon war might wake 
the echoes, but the river ran softly by the Ipswich 
garden of this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur 
reached him through his lilacs and laburnums. 

I have said that this book is one of the latest 
expressions of unadulterated eighteenth-century 
sentiment. For form's sake, the Diarist mentions 
now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, 
Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of 



208 



Gossip in a Library 



his study is bounded by a thick hedge behind the 
statue of Dryden. The classics of Greece and Rome, 
and the limpid reasonable writers of England from 
the Restoration downwards, these are enough for 
him. Writing in 1800 he has no suspicion of a new 
age preparing. We read these stately pages, and 
we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was 
written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued 
Lyrical Ballads, and Keats himself was in the 
world ? Almost the only touch which shows con- 
sciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature 
existed, is a reference to the rival translations of 
Burger's Lenore in 1797. Sir Walter Scott, as we 
know, was one of the anonymous translators; it 
was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor's, 
that Green mentions with special approbation. 

In one hundred years a mighty change has come 
over the tastes and fashions of literary life. When 
The Diary of a Lover of Literature was written, Dr. 
Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worces- 
ter, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the 
tradition of his yet more formidable master Warbur- 
ton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and 
Ibsen, so they argued in those days about Godwin 
and Home Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh 
incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was 
dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked 
at nights under the lamps and where disputants were 
gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr 
affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or check- 
mated reputations. " A flattering message from 

Dr. P M sends our Diarist into ecstasies so 

excessive that a reaction sets in, and the " predomin- 



The Diary of a Lover of Literature 209 



ant and final effect upon my mind has been depres- 
sion rather than elevation/' We think of 

The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung, 
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Kail ? 

Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' 
censure ? Yet in our Diarist's pages these take 
equal rank with names that time has spared, with 
Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds. 

Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in 
art than in literature. He was " particularly 
struck " at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a sea 
view by a painter called Turner : 

" Fishing vessels coming in with a heavy swell in 
apprehension of a tempest, gathering in the distance, 
and casting as it advances a night of shade, while a 
parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore ; 
the whole composition bold in design and masterly in 
execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the 
artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot 
fail to become the first in his department." 

A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest 
notices we possess of the effect which the youthful 
Turner, then but twenty-two years of age, made on 
his contemporaries. 

As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist 
almost entirely occupies himself with a discussion 
of the books he happens to be reading. His opinions 
are not always in concert with the current judgment 
of to-day; he admires Warburton much more that 
we do, and Fielding much less. But he never fails 
to be amusing, because so independent within the 
restricted bounds of his intellectual domain. He 



2io Gossip in a Library 



is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, 
but inside its wall his liberty of action is complete. 
Sometimes his judgments are sensibly in advance 
of his age. It was the fashion in 1798 to denounce 
the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and 
immoral. Green takes a wider view, and in a 
thoughtful analysis points out their judicious merits 
and their genuine parental assiduity. When Green 
can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he 
shows a sensitive quality of observation which might 
have been cultivated to general advantage. Here is 
a reflection which seems to be as novel as it is 
happy : 

" Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic 
Chapel in Duke Street. The thrilling tinkle of the 
little bell at the elevation of the Host is perhaps the 
finest example that can be given of the sublime by 
association — nothing so poor and trivial in itself, 
nothing so transcendently awful, as indicating the 
sudden change in the consecrated Elements, and the 
instant presence of the Redeemer/ ' 

Much of the latter part of the Diary, as we hold 
it, is occupied with the description of a tour in 
England and Wales. Here Green is lucid, graceful, 
and refined : producing one after another little 
vignettes in prose, which remind us of the simple 
drawings of the water-colour masters of the age, of 
Girtin or Cozens or Glover. The volume, which 
opened with some remarks on Sir William Temple, 
closes with a disquisition on Warton's criticism of 
the poets. The curtain rises for three years on a 
smooth stream of intellectual reflection, unruffled 
by outward incident, and then falls again before we 



The Diary of a Lover of Literature 2 1 1 



are weary of the monotonous flow of undiluted 
criticism. The Diary of a Lover of Literature is at 
once the pleasing record of a cultivated mind, and a 
monument to a species of existence that is as 
obsolete as nankeen breeches or a tie-wig. 

Isaac Disraeli said that Green had humbled all 
modern authors to the dust, and that he earnestly 
wished for a dozen volumes of The Diary. At 
Green's death material for at least so many supple- 
ments were placed in the hands of John Mitford, who 
did not venture to produce them. From January 
1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantly 
contributing to The Gentleman s Magazine unpub- 
lished extracts from this larger Diary. These have 
never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis 
Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into 
which the whole mass of them has been carefully and 
consecutively pasted, with copious illustrative 
matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose 
interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were 
unflagging. 



p 2 



m 



PETER BELL AND HIS 
TORMENTORS 



PETER BELL AND HIS 
TORMENTORS 

Peter Bell : A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London : Printed 
by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street : for Longman, Hurst, Rees, 
Or me and Brown, Paternoster Row. 1819. 

None of Wordsworth's productions are better 
known by name than Peter Bell, and yet few, 
probably, are less familiar, even to convinced 
Wordsworthians. The poet's biographers and critics 
have commonly shirked the responsibility of dis- 
cussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza 
has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, 
there is usually no more said about Peter Bell. A 
puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We 
have no positive knowledge why its publication was 
so long delayed ; nor, having been delayed, why it 
was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge 
of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a 
thoughtful critic, an essential element in the com- 
prehension of Wordsworth's poetry. No one who 
examines that body of literature with sympathetic 
attention should be content to overlook the piece 
in which Wordsworth's theories are pushed to their 
furthest extremity. 

When Peter Bell was published in April 1819, the 
author remarked that it had " nearly survived its 
minority ; for it saw the light in the summer of 

215 



216 Gossip in a Library 



1798." It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, 
that plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which 
Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the 
sum of £23 for one year, the rent covering the use 
of " a large park, with seventy head of deer." 

Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, 
and partly also to the peculiarities of its family 
history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered. 
The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep um- 
brageous drive to the point where the house, the 
park around it, and the Quantocks above them 
suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very 
much what Wordsworth's visitors saw when they 
trudged up from Stowey to commune with him in 
1797. The barrier of ancient beech-trees running 
up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch 
of fields and woods descending northward to the 
expanse of the yellow Severn Channel, the plain 
white fa$ade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy right 
of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous 
pathway down to the glen, the poet's favourite 
parlour at the end of the house — all this presents an 
impression which is probably less transformed, 
remains more absolutely intact, than any other 
which can be identified with the early or even the 
middle life of the poet. That William and Dorothy, 
in their poverty, should have rented so noble a 
country property seems at first sight inexplicable, 
and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge's 
squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never 
cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the 
trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, 
as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, " to keep the house 



Peter Bell and his Tormentors 217 



inhabited during the minority of the owner " ; it was 
let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797. 

It was in this delicious place, under the shadow 
of " smooth Quantock's airy ridge/' that Words- 
worth's genius came of age. It was during the 
twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost 
the final traces of the old tradional accent of poetry. 
It was here that the best of the Lyrical Ballads were 
written, and from this house the first volume of that 
epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. 
Among the poems written at Alfoxden Peter Bell 
was prominent, but we hear little of it except from 
Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by 
Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit 
permitted to read " the sibylline leaves/' and on a 
second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth 
himself chant Peter Bell, in his " equable, sustained, 
and internal " manner of recitation, under the ash- 
trees of Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether 
it has been noted that the landscape of Peter Bell, 
although localised in Yorkshire by the banks of the 
River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The 
poem was composed, without a doubt, as the poet 
tramped the grassy heights of the Quantock Hills, 
or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and mur- 
muring as he went, into one sylvan combe after 
another. To give it its proper place among the 
writings of the school, we must remember that it 
belongs to the same group as T intern Abbey and The 
Ancient Mariner. 

Why, then, was it not issued to the world with 
these ? Why was it locked up in the poet's desk 
for twenty-one years, and shown during that time, 



2i 8 Gossip in a Library 

as we gather from its author's language to Southey, 
to few, even of his close friends ? To these questions 
we find no reply vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not 
difficult to discover one. Every revolutionist in 
literature or art produces some composition in which 
he goes further than in any other in his defiance of 
recognised rules and conventions. It was Words- 
worth's central theory that no subject can be too 
simple and no treatment too naked for poetic 
purposes. His poems written at Alfoxden are 
precisely those in which he is most audacious in 
carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, 
is quite so simple or quite so naked as Peter Bell. 

Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in 
favour of the new ideas, has given us a notion of the 
amazement with which he listened to these pieces 
of Wordsworth, although he was " not critically 
nor sceptically inclined/ ' Others, we know, were 
deeply scandalised. I have little doubt that Words- 
worth himself considered that, in 1798, his own 
admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of 
Peter Bell, while, even so late as June 1812, when 
Crabb Robinson borrowed the MS. and lent it to 
Charles Lamb, the latter " found nothing good in 
it." Robinson seems to have been the one admirer 
of Peter Bell at that time, and he was irritated at 
Lamb's indifference. Yet his own opinion became 
modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 
181 9) he calls it " this unfortunate book/' 1 In 
another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says 
that he implored Wordsworth, before the book was 

1 The word unfortunate is omitted by the editor, Thomas 
Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth's 
descendants. 



Peter Bell and his Tormentors 219 



printed, to omit " the party in a parlour/' and also 
the banging of the ass's bones, but, of course, in vain. 

In 1819 much was changed. The poet was now 
in his fiftieth year. The epoch of his true product- 
iveness was closed; all his best works, except The 
Prelude, were before the public, and although Words- 
worth was by no means widely or generally recog- 
nised yet as a great poet, there was a considerable 
audience ready to receive with respect whatever so 
interesting a person should put forward. Moreover, 
a new generation had come to the front; Scott's 
series of verse-romances was closed; Byron was in 
mid-career ; there were young men of extraordinary 
and somewhat disquieting talent — Shelley, Keats, 
and Leigh Hunt — all of whom were supposed to be, 
although characters of a very reprehensible and even 
alarming class, yet distinctly respectful in their 
attitude towards Mr. Wordsworth. It seemed safe 
to publish Peter Bell. 

Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head 
of this chapter duly appeared in April 1819. It was 
so tiny that it had to be eked out with the Sonnets 
written to W. Westall's Views, and it was adorned 
by an engraving of Bromley's, after a drawing 
specially made by Sir George Beaumont to illustrate 
the poem. A letter to Beaumont, unfortunately 
without a date, in which this frontispiece is dis- 
cussed, seems to suggest that the engraving was a 
gift from the artist to the poet ; Wordsworth, " in 
sorrow for the sickly taste of the public in verse," 
opining that he cannot afford the expense of such 
a frontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests. In 
accordance with these fears, no doubt, an edition of 



220 Gossip in a Library 



only 500 was published; but it achieved a success 
which Wordsworth had neither anticipated nor 
desired. There was a general guffaw of laughter, 
and all the copies were immediately sold; within 
a month a ribald public received a third edition, 
only to discover, with disappointment, that the 
funniest lines were omitted. 

No one admired Peter Bell. The inner circle was 
silent. Baron Field wrote on the title-page of his 
copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, 
" And his carcass was cast in the way, and the Ass 
stood by it." Sir Walter Scott openly lamented 
that Wordsworth should exhibit himself " crawling 
on all fours, when God has given him so noble a 
countenance to lift to heaven." Byron mocked 
aloud, and, worse than all, the young men from 
whom so much had been expected, les jeunes feroces, 
leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so many 
hunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurt- 
ling parodies, the arrangement of which is still a 
standing crux to the bibliographers. 

It was Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, 
who opened the attack. His parody (Peter Bell : 
a Lyrical Ballad. London, Taylor and Hessey, 
1 81 9) was positively in the field before the original. 
It was said, at the time, that Wordsworth, feverishly 
awaiting a specimen copy of his own Peter Bell from 
town, seized a packet which the mail brought him, 
only to find that it was the spurious poem which 
had anticipated Simon Pure. The Times protested 
that the two poems must be from the same pen. 
Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the 
genuine poem; his preface is a close imitation of 



Peter Bell and his Tormentors 221 



Wordsworth's introduction, and the stanzaic form 
in which the two pieces are written is identical. 
On the other hand, the main parody is made up of 
allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and 
shows no acquaintance with the story of Peter Bell. 
Reynolds's whole pamphlet — preface, text, and 
notes — is excessively clever, and touches up the 
bard at a score of tender points. It catches the 
sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and it 
closes with this charming stanza : 

He quits that moonlight yard of skulls, 

And still he feels right glad, and smiles 

With moral joy at that old tomb ; 

Peter's cheek recalls its bloom, 

And as he creefeth by the tiles. 

He mutters ever — " W . W . 

Never more will trouble you, trouble you." 

Peter Bell the Second, as it is convenient, though 
not strictly accurate, to call Reynold's " ante- 
natal Peter/' was more popular than the original. 
By May a third edition had been called for, and 
this contained fresh stanzas and additional notes. 

Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for 
donkeys displayed both by Wordsworth and Coler- 
idge, was called The Dead Asses : A Lyrical Ballad ; 
and an elaborate production, the author of which 
I have not been able to discover, was published 
later on in the year, Benjamin the Waggoner (Bald- 
win, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which, although the 
title suggests The Waggoner of Wordsworth, is 
entirely taken up with making fun of Peter Bell. 
This parody — and it is certainly neither pointless 
nor unskilful — chiefly deals with the poet's fantastic 



222 Gossip in a Library 



prologue. Then, no less a person than Shelley, 
writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November 
of the same year, enclosed a Peter Bell the Third 
which he desired should be printed, yet in such a form 
as to conceal the name of the author. Perhaps 
Hunt thought it indiscreet to publish this not 
very amusing skit, and it did not see the light till 
long after Shelley's death. Finally, as though the 
very spirit of parody danced in the company of this 
strange poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its 
ill-fate in a sonnet imitated from Milton's defence 
of " Tetrachordon," singing how, on the appearance 
of Peter Bell, 

a harpy brood 
On Bard and Hero Humourously fell. 

Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, 
Lord Houghton has quietly remarked that it could 
not have been written by a man with a strong sense 
of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the 
stiff and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque 
prologue, both of which in all probability belong to 
1819, no less than of the story itself, in its three 
cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden 
and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than 
uninteresting. In the first part, a very wicked 
potter or itinerant seller of pots, Peter Bell, being 
lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, 
and thinks to steal an ass which he finds pensively 
hanging its head over the water ; Peter Bell presently 
discovers that the dead body of the master of the 
ass is floating in the river just below. (The poet, 
as he has naively recorded, read this incident in a 



Peter Bell and his Tormentors 223 



newspaper.) In the second part Peter drags the 
dead man to land, and starts on the ass's back to 
find the survivors. In the third part a vague 
spiritual chastisement falls on Peter Bell for his 
previous wickedness. Plot there is no more than 
this, and if proof were wanted of the inherent 
innocence of Wordsworth's mind, it is afforded by 
the artless struggles which he makes to paint a very 
wicked man. Peter Bell has had twelve wives, he 
is indifferent to primroses upon a river's brim, and 
he beats asses when they refuse to stir. This is 
really all the evidence brought against one who is 
described, vaguely, as combining all vices that " the 
cruel city breeds." 

That which close students of the genius of Words- 
worth will always turn to seek in Peter Bell is the 
sincere sentiment of nature and the studied sim- 
plicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. 
The narrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the 
attempts at wit and sarcasm ludicrous. Yet Peter 
Bell contains exquisite things. The Primrose stanza 
is known to every one ; this is not so familiar : 

The dragon's wing, the magic ring, 
I shall not covet for my dower, 
If I along that lowly way 
With sympathetic heart may stray 
And with a soul of power. 

Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its 

descriptive accent of 1798 : 

/ see a blooming Wood-boy there, 
And, if I had the power to say 
How sorrowful the wanderer is, 
Tour heart would be as sad as his 
T ill you had kissed his tears away ! 



224 Gossip in a Library 



Holding a hawthorn branch in hand. 
All bright with berries ripe and red ; 
Into the cavern } s mouth he peeps — 
Thence back into the moonlight creeps ; 
What seeks the boy ? — the silent dead ! 

It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell 
became aware of the dead body floating under the 
nose of the patient ass that Wordsworth loses himself 
in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, 
then the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a 
coffin, a shroud, a stone idol, a ring of fairies, a 
fiend. Last of all the poet makes the Potter, who 
is gazing at the corpse, exclaim : 

Is it a party in a parlour ? 

Cramm d just as they on earth were crammed — 

Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, 

But, as you by their faces see, 

All silent and all damned ! 

So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, 
however gifted, who has no sense of humour ! This 
simile was too much for the gravity even of intimate 
friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second 
edition it disappeared. 



THE FANCY 



Q 



THE FANCY 



The Fancy : A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, 
of Grays Inn, student at laiv. With a brief Memoir of his life. 
London : printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street. 1820. 

The themes of the poets run in a very narrow 
channel. Since the old heroic times when the 
Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with 
the sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great 
calm has settled down upon Parnassus. Generation 
after generation pipes the same tune of love and 
Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philoso- 
phies ; the same imagery, the same metres, meander 
within the same polite margins of conventional 
subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to 
break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century 
they made a valiant effort to sing of The Art of 
Preserving Health, and of The Fleece and of The 
Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like 
cumbrous whales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. 
Flaubert's friend, Louis Bouilhet, made a manful 
attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music of the 
birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus 
and the plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and 
the mastodon. But the public would have none of 
it, though ensphered in faultless verse, and the poets 
fled back to their flames and darts, and to the 
primrose at the river's brim. There is, however, 
something pathetic, and something that pleasantly 

Q 2 227 



228 Gossip in a Library 



reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect 
in these failures; and the book before us is an 
amusing example of such eccentric efforts to enlarge 
the sphere of the poetic activity. 

This little volume is called The Fancy, and it does 
not appear to me certain that the virtuous American 
conscience know what that means. If the young 
ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, 
" Tell us where is Fancy bred ? " we should have to 
reply, with a jingle, In the fists, not in the head. 
The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour, says : 

Fancy* s a term for every blackguardism, 

though this is much too severe. But rats, and they 
who catch them, badgers, and they who bait them, 
cocks, and they who fight them, and, above all, men 
with fists, who professionally box with them, come 
under the category of the Fancy. This, then, is the 
theme which the poet before us, living under the 
genial sway of the First Gentleman of Europe, 
undertook to place beneath the special patronage 
of Apollo. The attractions, however, of The Learned 
Ring, set all other pleasures in the shade, and the 
name, Peter Corcoran, which is a pseudonym, is, I 
suppose, chosen merely because the initials are those 
of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in 
short, the laureate of the P. C, and his book stands 
in the same relation to Boxiana that Campbells 
lyrics do to Nelson's despatches. To understand the 
poet's position, we ought to be dressed as he was; 
we ought 

to wear a rough drab coat 
With large pearl buttons all afloat 



The Fancy 



229 



Upon the waves of flush ; to tie 
A kerchief of the king-cup die 
{White- spotted with a small bird's eye) 
Around the neck, — and from the nape 
Let fall an easy, fan-like cape, 

and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company 
of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn over whom 
Thackeray let fall so delightfully the elegiac tear. 

Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic 
spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable 
sonnet : 

ON THE NONPAREIL. 

" None hut himself can be his parallel" 

With marble -coloured shoulders, — and keen eyes, 
Protected by a forehead broad and white, — 
And hair cut close lest it impede the sight, 

And clenched hands, firm, and of punishing size, — 

Steadily held, or motion' *d wary-wise 

To hit or stop, — and kerchief too drawn tight 
O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight 

The inconstant wind, that all too often flies, — 

The Nonpareil stands ! Tame, whose bright eyes run o'er 
With joy to see a Chicken of her own, 
Dips her rich pen in claret, and writes down 

Under the letter R, first on the score, 
" Randall, — John, — Irish Parents, — age not known, — 

Good with both hands, and only ten stone four ! " 

Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous 
reader ! Virtue is well revenged by the inevitable 
question ! " Who was John Randall ? " In 1820 it 
was said : " Of all the great men in this age, in 
poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of 
such transcendent talent as Randall, no one who 
combines the finest natural powers with the most 



230 



Gossip in a Library- 



elegant and finished acquired ones." Now, if his 
memory be revived for a moment, this master of 
science, who doubled up an opponent as if he were 
plucking a flower, and whose presence turned 
Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of 
being confounded with the last couple of drunken 
Irishwomen who have torn out each other's hair in 
handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard. The 
mighty have fallen, the stakes and ring are gone 
forever, and Virtue is avenged. The days of George 
IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical 
creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes 
of the glory of John Randall. 

It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in 
this odd collection of verses in praise of prize- 
fighting. There are lines and phrases that recall 
Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book 
is robust enough to satisfy the most impassioned 
of Tory editors. As it happens, it was written 
by Keats 's dearest friend, by John Hamilton 
Reynolds, whom the great poet mentions so 
affectionately in the latest of all his letters. 
Reynolds has been treated with scant considera- 
tion by the critics. His verses, I protest, are no 
whit less graceful or sparkling than those of his 
more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry 
Cornwall. His Garden of Florence is worthy of the 
friend of Keats. We have seen how his Peter Bell, 
which was Peter Bell the First, took the wind out 
of Shelley's satiric sails and fluttered the dove-cotes 
of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, 
too clever to live, in fact, too light a weight for a 
grave age. In The Fancy, which Keats seems to 



The Fancy 



231 



refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820, 
Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom 
Moore's Tom Crib, but if so, he vastly improves on 
that rather vulgar original. He takes as his motto, 
with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, 
and persuades us 

nor need we blame the licensed joys, 
Though false to Nature' } s quiet equipoise : 
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive. 

We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian 
sage at seeing his words thus nimbly adapted to be 
an apology for prize-fighting. 

The poems are feigned to be the remains of one 
Peter Corcoran, student at law. A simple and 
pathetic memoir — which deserved to be as successful 
as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life 
of the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti — 
introduces us to the unfortunate young Irishman, 
who was innocently engaged to a charming lady, 
when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by 
chance into the Fives Court, witnessed a " sparring- 
exhibition " by two celebrated pugilists, and was 
thenceforth a lost character. From that moment 
nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a 
scientific parry, and his only topic of conversation 
became the noble art of self-defence. To his dis- 
gusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies of the 
Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he 
appeared before her with two black eyes, for he 
could not resist the temptation of taking part in 
the boxing, and "it is known that he has parried 
the difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself/' 



232 



Gossip in a Library 



The attachment of the young lady had long been 
declining, and she took this opportunity of forbidding 
him her presence for the future. He felt this aban- 
donment bitterly, but could not surrender the all- 
absorbing passion which was destroying him. He 
fell into a decline, and at last died " without a 
struggle, just after writing a sonnet to West-Country 
Dick." 

The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a 
kind of sporting opera called King Tims the First, 
which is the tragedy of an emigrant butcher; an 
epic fragment in ottava ritna, called The Fields of 
Tothill, in which the author rambles on in the 
Byronic manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, 
before he has begun to get his story under weigh; 
and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter are 
simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written 
in Peter Corcoran's earlier days. The most charac- 
teristic and the best deal, however, with the science 
of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent by the poet to 
his mistress on the painful occasion which we have 
described above, " after a casual turn up " : 

Forgive me, — and never, oh, never again, 
Pll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety ; 1 

Fit give up all chance of a fracture or sprain, 

And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan y s 2 society. 

Forgive me, — and mufflers Fll carefully pull 

O'er my knuckles hereafter, to make them well-bred ; 

To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool, 
And temper with leather a punch of the head. 



1 "Heavy brown with a dash of blue in it " was the fancy 
phrase for stout mixed with gin. 

2 The author of Boxiana and Life in London. 



The Fancy 



2 33 



And, Kate ! — if you'll fib from your forehead that frown, 
And spar with a lighter and prettier tone ; — 

Fll look, — if the swelling should ever go down, 

And these eyes look again, — upon you, love, alone ! 

It must be confessed that a less " fancy " vocabulary 
would here have shown a juster sense of Peter's 
position. Sometimes there is no burlesque inten- 
tion apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses 
seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither 
to be expected nor to be feared that any one nowa- 
days will seriously attempt to advocate the most 
barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without 
conscientious scruples, we may venture to admit 
that these are very fine and very thrilling verses in 
their own unexampled class : 

Oh, it is life ! to see a proud 
And dauntless man step, full of hopes, 
Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, 
Throw in his hat, and with a spring 
Get gallantly within the ring ; 
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile 
Taking all cheerings with a smile ; 
To see him strip, — his well-trained form, 
White, glowing, muscular, and warm, 
All beautiful in conscious power, 
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour ; 
His glossy and transparent frame, 
In radiant plight to strive for fame ! 
To look upon the clean- shaped limb 
In silk and flannel clothed trim ; — 
While round the waist the kerchief tied 
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. 
'Tis more than life, to watch him hold 
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, 
Over his second's, and to clasp 
His rival's in a quiet grasp ; 



234 



Gossip in a Library 



To watch the noble attitude 

He takes, — the crowd in breathless mood, — 

And then to see, with adamant start, 

The muscles set, — and the great heart 

Hurl a courageous, sflendid light 

Into the eye, — and then — the Fight. 

This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan's 
books, only much more spirited and picturesque, 
and displaying a far higher and more Hellenic sense 
of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds' little volume, 
however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs 
of the prize-ring did not appreciate being celebrated 
in good verses, and The Fancy has come to be one 
of the rarest of literary curiosities. 



ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS 



ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS 



Ultra-crspidarius 5 a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt. London, 
1823 : printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38, Tavistock 
Street, Covent Garden. 

If the collector of first editions requires an instance 
from which to justify the faith which is in him 
against those who cry out that bibliography is 
naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. 
This active and often admirable writer, during a 
busy professional life, issued a long series of works 
in prose and verse which are of every variety of 
commonness and scarcity, but which have never 
been, and probably never will be, reprinted as a 
whole. Yet not to possess the works of Leigh Hunt 
is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of literary 
history at the beginning of the century. The original 
1816 edition of Rimini, for instance, is of a desperate 
rarity, yet not to be able to refer to it in the gro- 
tesqueness of this its earliest form is to miss a most 
curious proof of the crude taste of the young school 
out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The 
scarcest of all Leigh Hunt's poetical pamphlets, 
but by no means the least interesting, is that whose 
title stands at the head of this chapter. Of Ultra- 
crepidarius, which was " printed for John Hunt " 
in 1823, it i s believed that not half a dozen copies 
are in existence, and it has never been reprinted. 

237 



238 Gossip in a Library 



It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere des- 
pisers of first editions may allow a special interest. 

From internal evidence we find that Ultra- 
crepidarius ; a Satire on William Gifford, was sent 
to press in the summer of 1823, from Maiano, soon 
after the break-up of Hunt's household in Genoa, 
and Byron's departure for Greece. The poem is the 
" stick " which had been recently mentioned in the 
third number of the Liberal : 

Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick, 
Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick ? 

It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the 
famous review in the Quarterly of Keats's Endymion, 
a fact which the biographers of Keats do not seem 
to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately 
print it ? Perhaps because to have done so would 
have been worse than useless in the then condition 
of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to break 
through his intention of suppressing the poem it 
might be difficult to discover. At all events, in the 
summer of 1823 h e suddenly sent it home for 
publication; whether it was actually published is 
doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private 
to a handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends. 

Ultra-crefiidarius is written in the same anapaestic 
measure as The Feast of the Poets, but is somewhat 
longer. As a satire on William Gifford it possessed 
the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to 
be of any service to anybody. At the close of 1823 
Gifford, in failing health, was resigning the editorial 
chair of the Quarterly, which he had made so for- 
midable, and was retiring into private life, to die 



Ultra-Crepidarius 



^39 



in 1826. The poem probably explains, however, 
what has always seemed a little difficult to compre- 
hend, the extreme personal bitterness with which 
Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, 
since the slayer of the Delia Cruscans was not the 
man to tolerate being treated as though he were a 
Delia Cruscan himself. However narrow the circu- 
lation of Ultra-crepidarius may have been, care was 
no doubt taken that the editor of the Quarterly 
Review should receive one copy at his private 
address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in 
time for that odd incident to take place at the 
Roxburgh sale, when Barron Field called his atten- 
tion to the fact that " a little man, with a warped 
frame, and a countenance between the querulous 
and the angry, was gazing at me with all his might/ ' 
Hunt tells this story in the Autobiography, from 
which, however, he omits all allusion to his satire. 
The latter opens with the statement that : 

'Tts now about fifty or sixty years since 

(The date of a charming old boy of a Prince) — 

Mercury was in a state of rare fidget from the 
discovery that he had lost one of his precious 
winged shoes, and had in consequence dawdled 
away a whole week in company with Venus, not 
having dreamed that it was that crafty goddess 
herself, who, wishing for a pair of them, had 
sent one of Mercury's shoes down to Ashburton 
for a pattern. Venus confesses her peccadillo, and 
offers to descend to the Devonshire borough with 
her lover, and see what can have become of the 
ethereal shoe. As they reach the ground, they 



240 Gossip in a Library 



meet with an ill-favoured boot of leather, which 
acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate 
slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, 
who had been a shoemaker's apprentice in Ashburton. 
Mercury curses this unsightly object, and part of 
his malediction may here be quoted : 

/ hear some one say "Murrain take him, the ape/" 
And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller* s shape ; 
An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry, 
Who'd fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself Murray. 
Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe, 
For court-understrappers to congregate to ; 
For Southey to come, in his dearth of invention, 
And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension ; 
For Croker to lurk with his spider-like limb in, 
And stock his lean bag zvith waylaying the women ; 
And "Jove only knows for what creatures beside 
To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride, 
And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights, 
hi the dark take their shuffles, which they call their flights ; 
Be these the court-critics and vamp a Review. 
And by a poor figure, and therefore a true, 
For it suits zvith thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly 
Be its hue leathern, and title the Quarterly, 
Much misconduct ; and see that the others 
Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers ; 
Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate, 
Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate, 
Misinform, mis conjecture, misargue ; in short, 
Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court, 
# # # # # * # 

And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical, 
Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical, 
Quarterly-scutcheon' 'd, great heir to each dunce, 
Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once. 

At the end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take 
the semblance of a man, and the satire closes with 



Ultra-Crepidarius 



241 



its painful metamorphosis into Giffoid. The poem 
is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly remarkable 
for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated 
elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The 
allusions to Gifford's relations, nearly half a century 
earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor who first rescued him 
from poverty, the well-deserved scorn of his intoler- 
able sneers at Perdita Robinson's crutches : 

Hate Woman, thou block in the path of fair feet ; 
If Fate want a hand to distress them, thine be it ; 
When the Great, and their -flourishing vices, are mention' d 
Say people " impute " 'em, and show thou art pensioned ; 
But meet with a Prince's old mistress discarded, 
And then let the world see how vice is rewarded — 

the indications of the satirist's acquaintance with 
the private life of his victim, all these must have 
stung the editor of the Quarterly to the quick, and 
are very little in Hunt's usual manner, though he 
had examples for them in Peter Pindar and others. 
There is a very early allusion to " Mr. Keats and 
Mr. Shelley," where, " calm, up above thee, they 
soar and they shine." This was written imme- 
diately after the review of Endymion in the Quarterly. 

At the close is printed an extremely vigorous on- 
slaught of Hazlitt's upon Gifford, which is better 
known than the poem which it illustrates. In itself, 
in its preface, and in its notes alike this very rare 
pamphlet presents us with a genuine curiosity of 
literature. 



R 



DUKE OF RUTLAND'S 
POEMS 



THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S 
POEMS 

England's Trust and Other Poems. By Lord John Manners. London : 
printed for J. G. &f J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Tard, and Waterloo 
Place, Pall Mall 1841. 

My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord 
John Manners took his seat last night, in the Upper 
House, as the Duke of Rutland. These little 
romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who 
do not find that old friends get new names, which 
are very old names, in the course of a night. My 
Transatlantic readers will never have to grow 
accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of 
Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. 
Howells would consider it a chastisement to be 
hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wander- 
ting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away 
times, the fresh memory of which was still reverbera- 
ting about my childhood, when the last new Duke 
was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who 
never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to 
refashion his country to the harp of Amphion. 
So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, 
to that corner of my library where the ftdches de 
jeunesse stand — the little books of early verses 
which the respectable authors of the same would 

245 



246 Gossip in a Library 



destroy if they could — and I took down England's 
Trust. 

Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of 
them fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, most of 
them more or less born in the purple of good families, 
banded themselves together to create a sort of 
aristocratic democracy. They called themselves 
" Young England/' and the chronicle of them — 
is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's 
Coningsby ? In the hero of that novel people 
saw a portrait of the leader of the group, the Hon. 
George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also the 
poems now before us, -parvus non parvce pignus 
amicitice, were dedicated in a warm inscription. 
The Sidonia of the story was doubtless only echoing 
what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he 
said : " Man is only truly great when he acts from 
the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals 
to the imagination/ ' It was the theory of Young 
England that the historic memory must be awakened 
in the lower classes ; that utilitarianism was sapping 
the very vitals of society, and that ballads and 
May-poles and quaint festivities and processions 
of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for 
politicians to encourage. It was all very young, 
and of course it came to nothing. But I do not 
know that the Primrose League is any improvement 
upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland 
looks back across the half-century he sees something 
to smile at, but nothing to blush for. 

One of the notions that Young England had got 
hold of was that famous saying of Fletcher of 
Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of a 



The Duke of Rutland's Poems 247 



people. So they set themselves verse-making, and 
a quaint little collection of books it was that they 
produced, all smelling alike at this time of day, 
with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack, 
countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently 
became the seventh Viscount Strangford and one of 
the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers, only to die bit- 
terly lamented before the age of forty, wrote Historic 
Fancies. Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University 
College, Oxford, and afterwards a leading spirit 
among English Catholics, published The Cherwell 
Water-Lily, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet 
volume came the poems of Lord John Manners. 

When England's Trust appeared, its author had 
just left Cambridge. Almost immediately after- 
ward, it was decided that Young England ought to 
be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian 
chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard 
to prevail. Accordingly Lord John Manners pre- 
sented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conserva- 
tive candidates for the borough of Newark. He 
was elected, and so was the other Tory candidate, 
a man already distinguished, and at present 
known to the entire world as Mr. W. E. Gladstone. 
On the hustings, Lord John Manners was a good 
deal heckled, and in particular he was teased exces- 
sively about a certain couplet in England's Trust. 
I am not going to repeat that couplet here, for 
after nearly half a century the Duke of Rutland 
has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary indis- 
cretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume 
for themselves, which, of course, I have jxa power- 
to prevent their doing, they will probq^y exclaim 5 



248 Gossip in a Library 



" Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote that?" 
for if frequency of quotation is the hall-mark of 
popularity, his Grace must be one of the most 
popular of our living poets. 

There is something exceedingly pathetic in this 
little volume. Its weakness as verse, for it certainly 
is weak, had nothing ignoble about it, and what is 
weak without being in the least base has already 
a negative distinction. The author hopes to be 
a Lovelace or a Montrose, equally ready to do his 
monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke 
of Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he 
has been something less brilliant and much more 
useful, a faithful servant of his country, through 
an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 
1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the 
moment, looked for a return of the high festivals 
of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its 
Paynim foes. <c The worst evils," he writes, " from 
which we are now suffering, have arisen from our 
ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the 
Church/ 9 He was full of Newman and Pusey, of 
the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind 
of fervour blowing through England from the 
common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past 
recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception 
of Cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, 
like some precious exotic, in his Birmingham 
cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through 
the length and breadth of England without recover- 
ing one of those lost faces that fed the pure passion 
of his youth. 

The hand which brought the flame from Oriel 



The Duke of Rutland's Poems 249 



to the Cambridge scholar was that of the Rev. 
Frederick William Faber, and a great number of 
the poems in England's Trust are dedicated to him 
openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed 
to Faber, which is very pleasant to read : 

Dear Friend ! thou askest me to sing our loves, 
And sing them fain would I ; hut I do fear 

To mar so soft a theme ; a theme that moves 
My heart unto its core. O friend most dear ! 

No light request is thine ; albeit it -proves 
Thy gentleness and love, that do appear 
When absent thus, and in soft looks when near. 

Surely, if ever two fond hearts were twined 
In a most holy, mystic knot, so now 

Are ours ; not common are the ties that bind 
My soul to thine ; a dear Apostle thou, 

I a young Neophyte that yearns to -find 
The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow 
The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow / 

The Apostle was only twelve months older than 
the Neophyte, who was in his twenty-third year, 
but he was a somewhat better as well as stronger 
poet. The Cherwell Water-Lily is rather a rare 
book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give 
an example of Faber's style. It is from one of 
many poems in which, with something borrowed 
too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the 
very Apollo of Young England, there is yet a render- 
ing of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of 
the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, 
which is wholly original : 

There is a well, a willow-shaded spot, 
Cool in the noon- tide gleam, 
With rushes nodding in the little stream, 
And blue forget-me-not. 



250 Gossip in a Library 



Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge 

With big bright eyes of gold ; 

And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold 
Their blossoms strange and large. 

That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find 
Beauties so rich and rare, 

Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden' *s- hair 
And dog- grass richly twined. 

A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, 

Whereon a purple cloud 

Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, 
Had settled softly down. 

And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells 
From Oxford's holy towers 

Came down the stream, and went among the flowers, 
And died in little swells. 

These two extracts give a fair notion of the 
Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its 
love of Nature and its unreal conception of life. 
Faber also wrote an England's Trust, before Lord 
John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices 
in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, 
and in the coming of a new age of humility and 
spirituality. Alas ! it never came ! There was a 
roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells 
were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then 
the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and 
spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. 
We touch with reverend pity the volumes without 
which we should scarcely know that Young England 
had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all 
the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which 
they are the mere ashes have wholly passed away. 
They have become spread over a wide expanse of 



The Duke of Rutland's Poems 251 



effort, and no one knows who has been graciously 
affected by them. Who shall say that some distant 
echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the 
heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyr- 
dom ? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen 
or of the sword, that have made England what she 
is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would 
the adventure be ? 

The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first 
little heroic expedition into the land of verses. He 
published a volume of English Ballads / but this 
has not the historical interest which makes England's 
Trust a curiosity. He has written about Church 
Rates, and the Colonies, and the Importance of 
Literature to Men of Business, but never again of 
his reveries in Neville's Court nor of his determina- 
tion to emulate the virtues of King Charles the 
Martyr. No matter ! If all our hereditary legis- 
lators were as high-minded and single-hearted as 
the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House 
of Lords would scarcely be a burning question. 

1888. 



IONICA 



IONICA 



Ionica. Smithy Elder & Co., 65, CornhilL 1858. 

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible 
as diamonds. You throw it out of the window 
into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown 
slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, 
and by and by it turns up again somewhere un- 
injured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. 
No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do 
get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of 
fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But 
the quantity of excellent verse produced in any 
generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly 
within the same proportions. The verse-market is 
never really glutted, and while popular masses of 
what Robert Browning calls " deciduous trash " 
survive their own generation, only to be carted 
away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually 
pushes its path up silently into fame. 

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing 
with the small volume of 116 pages called Ionica, 
long ago ushered into the world so silently that 
its publication did not cause a single ripple on 
the sea of literature. Gradually this book has 
become first a rarity and then a famous posses- 
sion, so that at the present moment there is perhaps 

255 



256 



Gossip in a Library 



no volume of recent English verse so diminutive 
which commands so high a price among collectors. 
When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dis- 
persed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that 
they had a chance of securing this treasure at a 
reasonable price, for it was known that the late 
Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend 
of the author, had no fewer than three copies. 
But at the sale two of these copies went for three 
pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, 
and the third was knocked down for a guinea, 
because it was discovered to lack the title-page and 
the index. (I do not myself think it right to en- 
courage the sale of imperfect books, and would not 
have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes 
if I could not have the title-page. But this is only 
an aside, and does not interfere with the value of 
Ionica.) 

The little book has no name on the title-page, 
but it is known that the author was Mr. William 
Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow 
of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood 
that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died 
in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard, 
in the west of England, he took the name of Cory. 
So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anony- 
mous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory he 
wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of 
the author of Ionica. In face of the extreme rarity 
of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its 
republication, and he consented. Probably he 
would have done well to refuse, for the book is 
rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to 



Ionica 



257 



reprint it was to draw public attention to its in- 
equality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-minded- 
ness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but 
I think the appreciators of Ionica will always be 
few in number, and it seems good for those few to 
have some difficulties thrown in the way of their 
delights. 

Shortly after Ionica appeared great developments 
took place in English verse. In 1858 there was 
no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as 
far as the general public was concerned, there was no 
Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact 
has to be taken into consideration in dealing with 
the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's verses. They 
are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we 
became accustomed to later on. The tone is ex- 
tremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But 
where the author is at his best, he is not only, as 
it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, 
with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The 
book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and 
the following piece, although really a translation, 
has no statement to that effect. Before I quote 
it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original 
is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it 
was written by the great Alexandrian poet Calli- 
machus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the 
poet Heraclitus — not to be confounded with the 
philosopher — was dead. 

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead ; 
They brought me hitter news to hear and hitter tears to shed. 
I weft, as I remembered, how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. 
s 



258 Gossip in a Library 



And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, 
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest, 
Still are thy -pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake ; 
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take. 

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and 
more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite 
addition to a branch of English literature, which 
is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. 
I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter 
or tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the death 
of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the know- 
ledge that the dead man's songs, his " nightingales/' 
are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, 
the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, 
has left " great verse unto a little clan," the last 
service for the dead to whom it was enough to be 
" unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the 
span of heaven, and few ears." To modern vul- 
garity, whose ideal of Parnassus is a tap-room of 
howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, 
as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that 
a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer 
than the public. The author of lonica would 
deserve well of his country if he had done no more 
than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from 
the Greek waters. 

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, 
there are several not less exquisite than this memory 
of Callimachus. But the author is not very safe on 
modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I 
read : 

" Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar ; 

How nice" cry the ladies, " looks yonder Hussar ! " 



Ionica 



259 



It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace 
to these colloquial numbers, and the author of 
Ionica is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest 
with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with 
purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy. 

There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable 
to break the glassy surface of this plaintive Dirge : 

Naiad, hid beneath the hank 

By the willowy river-side, 
Where Narcissus gently sank, 

Where unmarried Echo died, 
Unto thy serene repose 
Waft the stricken Anteros. 

Where the tranquil swan is borne, 

Imaged in a watery glass, 
Where the sprays of fresh fink thorn 
Stoop to catch the boats that pass, 
Where the earliest orchis grows, 
Bury thou fair Anteros. 

On a flickering wave we gaze, 

Not upon his answering eyes : 
Flower and bird we scarce can praise, 

Having lost his sweet replies : 
Cold and mute the river flows 
With our tears for Anteros. 

We know well where this place of burial is to be. 
Not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, 
but where a homelier river gushes through the 
swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral 
meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to 
draw a longer breath for his passage between Eton 
and Windsor. 

The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a 
wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan op- 



260 Gossip in a Library 



timism which finds no fault with human existence 
save that it is so brief. It gains various expres- 
sion in words that seem hot on a young man's lips, 
and warm on the same lips even when no longer 
young : 

borrow life, and not grow old ; 
And nightingales and trees 
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold, 
As young as Sophocles. 

And again, in poignant notes : 

You promise heavens free from strife, 
Pure truth, and perfect change of will ; 

But sweet, sweet is this human life, 

So sweet, I fain would breathe it still ; 

Your chilly stars I can forego, 

This warm, kind world is all I know. 

This last quotation is from the poem called Mininer- 
tnus in Church. In this odd title he seems to refer 
to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous 
in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid 
on the necessity of extracting from life all it had 
to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal 
love, which was the life of life. The author of 
lonica seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to 
modern England, and to conduct him to church 
upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is 
impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is 
right when he says that all earthly pleasures are 
fugitive. He has always confessed as much at 
home under the olive tree ; it was because they were 
fugitive that he clung to them : 

All beauteous things for which we live 
By laws of time and space decay. 



Ionica 



261 



But oh ! the very reason why 
I clasp them, is because they die. 

There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which 
a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is 
better reproduced than in Ionica, and this gives 
its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had 
numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and 
landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats 
and Andre Chenier. Many of these have been so 
brilliantly successful that only pedantry would 
deny their value. But in Ionica something is 
given which the others have not known how to 
give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass 
of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to 
help us to comprehend the little rites and playful 
superstitions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built 
a tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost; why 
the shining hair of Lysidice, when she was drowned, 
should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach 
in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy 
blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader 
as Christian fanatics turned inside out ; for all their 
vehemence they can never lose the experience of 
their religious birth. The same thing is true of 
the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. 
The Cross prevailed at their nativity, and has thrown 
its shadow over their conscience. But in the midst 
of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of 
the Ionica, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely 
untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. 
I do not commend the fact; I merely note it as 
giving a strange interest to these forlorn and 
unpopular poems. 



262 



Gossip in a Library 



Twenty years after the publication of Ionica, 
and when that little book had become famous 
among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge 
a second part, without a title-page, and without 
punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking 
pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur 
will probably regard his collection incomplete with- 
out Ionica II., but he must be prepared for a dis- 
appointment. There is a touch of the old skill 
here and there, as in such stanzas as this : 

With half a moon, and clouds rose-fink, 

And water-lilies just in hud, 
With iris on the river-brink, 

And white weed- garlands on the mud, 
And roses thin and pale as dreams, 

And happy cygnets born in May, 
No wonder if our country seems 

Drest out for Freedom's natal day. 

Or these : 

Peace lit upon a fluttering vein, 
And self-forgetting on the brain ; 
On rifts by passion wrought again 
Splashed from the sky of childhood rain, 

And rid of afterthought were we 

And from foreboding sweetly free. 

Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine, 
And, moved by some autumnal sign, 
I who in spring was glad repine 
And ache without my anodyne ; 

Oh ! things that were ! Oh ! things that are ! 

Oh ! setting of my double star ! 

But these are rare, and the old unique Ionica of 
thirty years earlier is not repeated. 



THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT 



THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT 



The Shaving of Shagpat. An Arabian Entertainment. By George 
Meredith. Chapman and Hall. 1856. 

It is nearly forty years since I first heard of The 
Shaving of Shagpat. I was newly come, in all my 
callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, 
and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new 
world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, 
remarked to all present whom it should concern, 
that The Shaving of Shagpat was a book which 
Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I 
now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language 
this did not mean that there was anything specially 
reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but 
simply that it was a monstrous fine production, 
and worthy of all attention. But at the time I 
expected, from such a title, something in the way 
of a belated Midsummer Night's Dream or Love's 
Labour s Lost. I was fully persuaded that it must 
be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, 
and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this 
dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do 
still clumsily connect it with the idea of Shake- 
speare. But in truth The Shaving of Shagpat has 
no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon 
would have written if he had been so plaguily 

265 



266 Gossip in a Library 



occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and 
of the finest literary flavour. 

The ordinary small collection of rarities has no 
room for three- volume novels, those signs-manual of 
our British dulness and crafty disdain for literature. 
One or two of these simulacra, these sham-semblances 
of books, I possess, because honoured friends have 
given them to me; even so, I would value the gift 
more in the decency of a single volume. The dear 
little duodecimos of the last century, of course, 
are welcome in a library. That was a happy day, 
when by the discovery of a Ferdinand Count Fathom, 
I completed my set of Smollett in the original 
fifteen volumes. But after the first generation of 
novelists, the sham system began to creep in. With 
Fanny Burney, novels grow too bulky, and it is a 
question whether even Scott or Jane Austen should 
be possessed in the original form. Of the moderns, 
only Thackeray is bibliographically desirable. Hence 
even of Mr. George Meredith's fiction I make no 
effort to possess first editions; yet The Shaving of 
Shagpat is an exception. I toiled long to secure it, 
and, now that I hold it, may its modest vermilion 
cover shine always like a lamp upon my shelves ! 
It is not fiction to a bibliophile; it is worthy of all 
the honour done to verse. 

Within the last ten years of his life we had the 
great pleasure of seeing tardy justice done at length 
to the genius of Mr. George Meredith. I like to 
think that, after a long and noble struggle against 
the inattention of the public, after the pouring of 
high music for two generations into ears whose 
owners seemed to have wilfully sealed them with 



The Shaving of Shagpat 267 



wax, so that only the most staccato and least happy 
notes ever reached their dulness, George Meredith 
did, before the age of seventy, reap a little oi his 
reward. I am told that the movement in favour 
of him began in America; if so, more praise to 
American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate 
De Quincey and Praed before we knew the value 
of those men. Yet is there much to do. Had 
George Meredith been a Frenchman, what mono- 
graphs had ere this been called forth by his 
work ; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark even, such 
gifts as his would long ago have found their classic 
place above further discussion. But England is a 
Gallio, and in defiance of Mr. Le Gallienne, cares 
little for the things of literature. 

If a final criticism of George Meredith existed, 
where in it would The Shaving of Shagpat find its 
place ? There is fear that in competition with the 
series 'of analytical studies of modern life that 
stretches from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to One 
of our Conquerors, it might chance to be pushed 
away with a few lines of praise. Now, I would not 
seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extra- 
vaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a master- 
piece of morality like The Egoist in the other, I can 
doubt which is the greater book; but there are 
moods in which I am jealous ot the novels, and wish 
to be left alone with my Arabian Entertainment. 
Delicious in this harsh world of reality to fold a 
mist around us, and out of it to evolve the yellow 
domes and black cypresses, the silver fountains 
and marble pillars, of the fabulous city of Shagpat. 
I do not know any later book than The Shaving 



268 Gossip in a Library 



in which an Englishman has allowed his fancy, 
untrammelled by any sort of moral or intellectual 
subterfuge, to go a-roaming by the light of the 
moon. We do this sort of thing no longer. We 
are wholly given up to realism; we are harshly 
pressed upon on all sides by the importunities of 
excess of knowledge. If we talk of gryphons, the 
zoologists are upon us; of Oolb or Aklis, the geo- 
graphers flourish their maps at us in defiance. 
But the author of The Shaving of Shagpat, in the 
bloom of his happy youthful genius, defied all this 
pedantry. In a little address which has been 
suppressed in later editions he said (December 8, 
1855) : 

" It has seemed to me that the only way to tell 
an Arabian Story was by imitating the style and 
manner of the Oriental Story-tellers. But such an 
attempt, whether successful or not, may read like 
a translation : I therefore think it better to prelude 
this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs 
from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an 
original Work." 

If one reader of The Shaving of Shagpat were 
to confess the truth he would say that to him at 
least the other, the genuine Oriental tales, appear 
the imitation, and not a very good imitation. The 
true genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, 
and the Arabian Nights, at all events in the crude 
literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them 
like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, 
the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic 
shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of 
the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly 



The Shaving of Shagpat 269 



from some bottle of a genie. Ah ! what a bottle ! 
As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, 
we cry, like Sganarelle : 

Qifils sont doux — 
Bouteille jolie — 
Quails sont doux 
Vos fetits glou-glous ; 
Ah! Bouteille, ma mie ; 
Pourquoi vous videz-vous ? 

Ah ! why indeed ? For The Shaving of Shagpat is 
one of those very rare modern books of which it 
is certain that they are too short, and even our 
excitement at the Mastery of the Event is tamed 
by a sense that the show is closing, and that Shibli 
Bagarag has been too promptly successful in smiting 
through the Identical. But perhaps of all gifts 
there is none more rare than this of clearing the 
board and leaving the reader still hungry. 

Who shall say, in dealing with such a book, 
what passage in it is best or worst ? Either the 
fancy, carried away utterly captive, follows the 
poet whither he will, or the whole conception is a 
failure. Perhaps, after the elemental splendour and 
storm of the final scene, what clings most to the 
memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the 
Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the 
broken sapphire hair of Garraveen; or again, how 
on the black coast of the enchanted sea, wandering 
by moonlight, he found the sacred Lily, and tore 
it up, and lo ! its bulb was a palpitating heart of 
human flesh ; or how Bhanavar called the unwilling 
serpents too often, and failed to win her beauty 
back, till, at an awful price she once more, and for 



270 Gossip in a Library 



the last time, contrived to call her body-guard of 
snakes hissing and screaming around her. 

There is surely no modern book so unsullied as 
this is by the modern spirit, none in which the desire 
to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly to topics of 
the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny, 
interferes less with the tender magic of Oriental 
fancy, or with the childlike, earnest faith in what is 
utterly outside the limits of experience. It belongs 
to that infancy of the world, when the happy guile- 
less human being still holds that somewhere there 
is a flower to be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or 
a form of words to be spoken which will reverse 
the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling 
spirits bound to incredible services, and change all 
this brown life of ours to scarlet and azure and 
mother-of-pearl. Little by little, even our children 
are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, 
and that class of writing which seems to require less 
effort than any other, and to be a mere spinning of 
gold thread out of the poet's inner consciousness, 
is less and less at command, and when executed 
gives less and less satisfaction. The gnomes of 
Pope, the fays and " trilbys " of Nodier, even the 
fairy-world of Doyle, are breathed upon by a race 
that has grown up habituated to science. But even 
for such a race it must be long before the sumptuous 
glow and rich triumphant humour of The Shaving 
of Shagpat have lost all their attraction. 



INDEX 



Abbey, Edwin A., 4, 5 
Abuses stript and whipt, 32-35 
Akenside, Mark, 158 
d'Alembert, 141 
Alfoxden, Wordsworth at, 

216-224 
All for Love, Dryden's, 76 
Almahide, Mile, de Scudery's, 

64 

Atnasia, John Hopkins', 111- 
117 

Amazon Queen, Weston's, 77- 

Amboyna, Dryden's, 85 
Amory's Life of John Bundle, 

Thomas, 1 73-1 81 
Anthony, Earl of Orrery's Mr., 

11 

Arcadia, Sidney's, 63 

Ardelia (Lady Winchilsea) 's 

Poems, 101-108 
Arnauld, Antoine, 97 
Arnold, Matthew, 81, 101, 

257 

Artamenes, La Calprenede's, 64 
Astree, D'Urfe's, 63 
d'Aurevilly, Barbey, 186 
Austen, Jane, 266 
Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 
239 

Avison, Charles, 156 

Bacon, Lord, 265 
Baldwin, William, 22-26 
Ballad of the Book Hunter, 

Lang's, 71 
Balzac, Honore de, 81 
Bancroft's Sertorius, 76-77 
Banks, Sir Joseph, 196 

2 



Barnacle Goose Tree, The, 56- 
57 

Barrington, Hon. Daines, 196 

197 
Bayle, 146 

Beaumont, Peter Bell and Sir 

George, 219 
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 72, 133 
Bell, Professor Thomas, 196, 

199-201 
Benjamin the Waggoner, 221 
Blener Hasset, Thomas, 26 
Boccaccio, 23 
Boethius, 3 

Boileau, Nicolas, 97-98 
Boisrobert, Francois, 93, 95 
Boitard, Louis, 166 
Bossuet, Jacques, 97 
Boswell, James, 157 
Bouilhet, Louis, 227 
Boxiana, Egan's, 228, 232 
Boyle's Parthenissa, 67 
Bradshaw, Library of Henry, 
256 

Britannia, Brooke's Discovery 

of Errors in, 15 
Britannia, Camden's, 11-18 
British Princes, Howard's, 73- 

74 

Brooke, Christopher, 34 
Brooke, Ralph, 15 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 56 
Browne, William, 33 
Browning, Robert, 151, 160- 

161, 255 
Brummell, Beau, 186, 190 
Brunfelsius, Otto, 52 
Buncle, Amory's Life of John, 

1 73-i 8 1 



272 



Index 



Burger's Lenore, 208 
Burke, Edmund, 205, 209 
Burney, Dr., 156 
Burney, Fanny, 266 
Burton, Sir Richard, 268 
Byron, 219-220, 238 

Callimachus, 257-258 
Calprenede, La, 62-68, 133 
Cambridge described by 

Camden, 17 
Camden's Britannia, 11-18 
Campbell, J. Dykes, 220 
Campion, Thomas, 84 
Carew, Thomas, 46, 85 
Carlisle's Fortune Hunters, 77 
Carnival, Porter's, 74 
Cassandra, La Calprenede's, 

Cats, 141-147 

Caylus, Count, 147 

Chandler, Dr., 196 

Chapelain, 92 

Charles I, 63, 82, 251 

Cherwell Water-Lily, Faber's 
The, 247, 249 

Church, Dean, 21 

Cibber, Theophilus, 102 

Citizen of the World, Gold- 
smith's, 169 

Clelie, La Calprenede's, 64-65 

Cleomina, Eliza Haywood's 
Secret History of, 136 

Cleopatra, La Calprenede's, 64- 
65 

Cleveland, Duchess of, 152 
Coleridge, S. T., 208, 216, 217, 
221 

Collins, William, 156, 158 
Congreve, William, 71, 105, 
116 

Constant Couple, Farquhar's, 

117, 122 
Corcoran, Peter, i. e. J. H. 

Reynolds, 209, 230 
Corneille, Pierre, 95 
Corneille, Thomas, 95 
Cornwall, Barry, 230 
Cory, William, see Johnson, 

William, 256 



Couches de V Academie, Fure- 

tiere's, 98 
Coventry, Rev. Francis, 165- 

170 

Coventry, Henry, 167 
Coypel, Drawings by, 147 
Croker, J. W., 240 
Cromwell, Oliver, 83 
Crowne, John, 84 
" Crusions," 159 
Cyrus, Le Grand, 63 

Darlington, Earl of, 152 
David, Smart's Song to, 15 7-1 61 
Davies of Hereford, John, 35, 

67 

Death's Duel, 41-47 
De Boissat, 94 
Defoe, Daniel, 132 
Dennis, John, 81, 86 
De Quincey, Thomas, 267 
Deshoulieres, Mme., 144 
Desmarais, Regnier, 96 
De Tabley, Lord, 4 
Dialogues, La Mothe le Vayer, 
145 

Diary of a Lover of Literature, 

Green's, 205-211 
Dictionary, The Romance of a, 

91-98 

Dioscorides of Anazarba, 51- 
52 

DTsraeli, Isaac, 211 
D 'Israeli's Coningsby, 246 
Dobson, Mr. Austin, 91 
Dodonaeus, Rembertus, 52 
Donne, Dr. John, 41-47 
Dryden, John, 71, 76-77, 82, 

85, 86, 105, 205, 208 
Dryden, Funeral of, 127-128 
Dunciad, Pope's, 132 
Dupuy, Mile., 146 
D'tJrfe's Astree, 63 
" Dwale " (nightshade), 54 

Egan's Boxiana, Pierce, 232, 
234 

Egoist, Meredith's The, 267 
Elegy in Country Churchyard, 
Gray's, 74 



Index 



2 73 



England's Trust, F. W. Faber's, 
250 

England's Trust, Lord John 

Manners', 245-250 
England's Worthies, Winstan- 

ley's, 83, 85 
English Ballads, Lord John 

Manners', 251 
English Poets, Winstanley's 

Lives of, 82-87 
Enquiry Concerning Virtue, 

Shaftesbury's, 207 
Epistolary Poems of Charles 

Hopkins, 112 
Epsom Wells, Shad well's, 104 
Excursion, Wordsworth's, 81 

Faber, Frederick William, 

247, 249 
Fall of Princes, Lydgate's, 23 
Fancy, The, J. H. Reynolds', 

227-234 
Farmer, Dr., 151 
Farquhar, George, 116, 121-128 
Fatal Friendship, Trotter's, 

125 

Feast of the Poets, The, 238 
Ferdinand Count Fathom, 

Smollett's, 266 
Ferrers, George, 22-24, 26 
Field, Barron, 239 
Fielding, Henry, 175, 209 
Finch, Heneage (Earl of Win- 

chilsea), 102-107 
Finch, Poems of Anne (Lady 

Winchilsea), 101-108 
FitzGerald, Edward, 207, 211 
Fortune Hunters, Carlisle's The, 

77 

Franqaise, Histoire de 1' Acade- 
mic, 91-98 
Francion, Sorel's, 94 
Fuchsius, Leonard, 52 
Furetiere, Antoine, 92, 94 

Garden of Florence, Reynolds', 
230 

Gardiner, Lord Chancellor 

Stephen, 23 
Garrick, David, 156 
T 



Garth, Dr., 127 

Gentleman's Magazine, The, 

206, 211 
Gerard, John, 51-57 
Gibbon, Edward, 209 
Gibbons, Dr. (Physician), 116 
Gifford, William, 237-241 
Gladstone, W. E., 247 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 169-170 

185-191 
Gombreville, 62, 65 
Goose Tree, The, 56-57 
Grafton, Isabella, Duchess of, 

113-116 
Gray, Thomas, 74, 102, 153- 

158, 165 
Green, Thomas, 206-211 
Green's Diary of a Lover of 

Literature, 205-211 
Grierson, Professor, 47 
Grundtvig, Bishop, 43 
Gulliver's Travels, Swift, 175 

Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 113 
Harrington's Oceana, 7 
Harvey, Rev. R., 158-160 
Haslewood, 23 
Hawkesworth, John, 157 
Haywood, Eliza, 1 31-13 7 
Hazlitt, William, 31, 180, 218, 
241 

Heliodorus, 63 

Heraclitus, 257 

Herbal, Gerard's, 51-57 

, Henry Lyte's translation 

of Dodonseus', 52 
, Dr. Priest's translation 

of Dodonaeus', 53 
Herrick, Robert, 85-86 
Hesketh (Yorkshire botanist), 

55 

Hesperides, Herrick's, 86 
Hill, Aaron, 132 
Hill, Dr. John, 156 
Hilliad, Smart's The, 156 
Histoire de I'Academie Fran- 

qaise(The Hague Edn.), 91-98 
Historic Funcies, Lord Strang- 

ford's, 247 
Hoare, William, 187 



274 



Index 



Holland, Philemon, n, 13, 
17 

Hop Garden, Smart's The, 152, 
155 

Hopkins, Charles, 112 
Hopkins, Ezekiel, Bishop of 

Derry, 11 2-1 15 
Hopkins, John, 111-117 
Hove, F. H. Van (Engraver), 

112 

Howard, Hon. Edward, 73 
Humorous Lovers, Duke of 

Newcastle's, 74, 75 
Hunt, Leigh, 33, 219, 222, 237- 

241 

Hurd, Dr., Bishop of Worcester, 
208 

Hyde, Edward, Earl of Claren- 
don, 46 

Ibrahim, Mile, de Scudery's, 
64 

Idalia, Eliza Haywood's, 132, 
135 

Ionica, William Johnson's, 
255-262 

James I, 17, 21 
Jeffrey, Francis, 81 
Jenyns, Soame, 208-209 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 78, 156- 
157 

Johnson, Thomas (Botanist), 
53 

Johnson, William, 255-262 
Jonson, Ben, 38 
Joyner, William, 72-73 
Jusserand, J. J., English Novel 

in the Time of Shakespeare, 

68 

Keats, John, 33, 208, 220, 230, 

238, 258, 261 
King, Dr. Henry, 45 
Kip, William, 16 

Lamb, Charles, 32, 81, 180, 

218, 224 
Lang, Andrew, 71 
La Rochefoucauld, 62 



Lee, Nathaniel, 76-77, 84 
Le Gallienne, Mr., 267 
Le Grand Cyrus, 63, 64, 67 
Lenore, Burger's, 208 
Lerpiniere, Daniel, 199 
Les Chats, Moncrifs, 141-147 
Lesdiguieres, Duchess of, 145, 
147 

Letters of Lord Chesterfield, 210 
Liberal, The, 238 
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 3 
Lombard (Antiquary), 14 
Longueville, Mme. de, 62 
Louis XIV, 61, 63, 92 
Love and a Bottle, Farquhar's, 
116 

Love and Business, Farquhar's, 

121-128 
Love in Excess, Eliza Haywood, 

132, 135 
Loveday, Robert, 67 
Lydgate's Fall of Princes, 23 

Maine, Duchess of, 145 
Manners, Lord John (see Rut- 
land, Duke of), 245-251 
Manship, Samuel, 85 
Marot, Clement, 146 
Marshalsea Prison, 32-33 
Marvell, Andrew, 84, 102 
Mason, William, 156, 158 
Mazell, Peter (Engraver), 199 
Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 
165 

Memoirs of Several Ladies of 
Great Britain, Amory's, 173 
Mentzelius, Christian, 2-3 
Meredith's, The Shaving of 

Shagpat, 265-270 
Mezeray, Francois, 93 
Milton, John, 82-84, 2 °7> 222 
Mimnermus in Church, John- 
son's, 260 
Mirror for Magistrates, A, 

21-28 
Mitford, John, 211 
Mithridates, Lee's, 76 
Moll Flanders, Defoe, 132 
Moncrif, Augustin Paradis de, 
141-147 



Index 



275 



Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 
167 

Moore's Tom Crib, Thomas, 
231 

Murray, John, 240 

Nash, Beau, 1 85-1 91 
Newbery, Francis, 151 
Newbery, John (Publisher), 

155-156 
Newcastle's Humorous Lovers, 

Duke of, 74-75 
Niccols, Richard, 26 
Nichols, John Bowyer, 86 
Nodier, 270 
Norden, John, 16 
Nottingham, Sonnet to the 

Earl of, 27 

Oceana, Harrington's, 7 
Orford, Countess of (Pompey 

the Little), 168 
Orrery, Earl of, 77 
Ortelius, Abraham, 13-14 
Osborne, Dorothy, 64, 67 
Otten (Engraver), 147 
Otway, Thomas, 71, 77, 84 

Pamela, Richardson's, 133, 136 
Paradise Lost and Paradise 

Regained, Milton's, 82 
Parleyings, Brownings, 151 
Parr, Dr., 209-210 
Parthenissa, Boyle's, 67 
Payne, John, (line-engraver) 51 
Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul, 92 
Pennant, Thomas, 196-197 
Percy, Bishop of Dromore, Dr. 

Thomas, 86 
Peter Bell : A Tale in Verse, 

Wordsworth's, 2 1 5-224 
Peter Bell : A Lyrical Ballad, 

Hamilton's, 220-221 
Peter Bell the Third, Shelley's, 

222, 230 
Peter Corcoran, 231-232 
Pharamond, La Calprenede's, 

61-68 

Philemon to Hydaspes, Coven- 
try's, 167 



Phillips, John, 68 
Pindar, Peter, 78 
Plays, A Volume of Old, 71- 

73 

Poems of Anne Finch (Lady 

Winchilsea), 1 01-108 
Poems of Christopher Smart, 

151-161 

Poet in Prison, A {The Shep- 

heards Hunting), 31-38 
Poets, A Censor of, 81-87 
Poets, Winstanley's Lives of 

English, 81-87 
Polexandre, Gomberville's, 63 
Pompey the Little, F. Coven- 
try's, 165-170 
Pope, Alexander, 31, 81, 108, 

132, 156, 270 
Porter, Major Thomas, 74 
Praed, W. Mackworth, 267 
Prelude, Wordsworth's, The, 
219 

Priest, Dr., 52-53 
P seudodoxi a Epidemica, 
Browne's, 56 

Quarterly Review, The, 240-241 
Queensberry, Duchess of, 187, 
190 

Rabelais, 180 
Racine, Jean, 97-98 
Radcliffe, Dr. John, 190 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 27 
Randall, John, 229-231 
Ravenscroft, Edward, 72, 77 
Reynolds' Peter Bell, John 

Hamilton, 209, 230 

The Fancy, 227-234 

Richardson, Samuel, 156, 175 
Richelieu, Cardinal, 92 
Rimini, Leigh Hunt's, 237 
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 218 
Robinson, Perdita, 241 
Rochefoucauld, La, 62 
Roman Bourgeois, Le, Fure- 

tiere's, 94 
Roman Empress, Joyner's, 72- 

73 

Ronsard, 144 



276 



Index 



Roscommon, Earl of, 84 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 257, 
265 

Roubillac, 156 
Rowe, Nicholas, 108 
Roxana, Defoe, 132 
Roy (Poet), 142 
Rutland, Poems of Duke of, 
245-252 

Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, 

Thomas, 22, 25 
Sadler, Thomas, 218 
Sainte-Beuve, 81 
Saint-Simon, 190 
Sampson Agonista, Milton's, 82 
Sandford, Mrs., 216 
Savage, Richard, 156 
Scarron, 145 

Scott, Sir Walter, 21, 208, 219- 

220, 266 
Scudery, Mile, de, 62, 64-65, 

67, 133 

Sedley, Sir Charles, 72, 84 

Selborne, White's The Natural 
History of, 195-201 

Sertorius, Bancroft's, 76-78 

Settle, Elkanah, 72 

Sevigne, Mme. de, 62 

Shadwell, Thomas, 72, 104 

Shaftesbury's Enquiry Con- 
cerning Virtue, 207 

Shaving of Shagpat, George 
Meredith's The, 265-270 

Shelley, 34, 81, 219, 241 

Shepheards Hunting, Wither 's 
The, 34-38 

Shipwreck, Falconer's The, 159 

Shirley, James, 75 

Sidney's Arcadia, 63 

Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar's, 
122 

Skelton's Contribution to 
Mirror for Magistrates, 25 

Smart, Christopher, 151-161 

Smollett, Tobias, 175 

Smythe (see Lord Strangford), 
George Percy Sydney, 246 

Solly, Edward, 2 

Song to David, Smart's, 1 57-161 



Sorel, Charles, 94 
Southerne, Thomas, 72 
Southey, Robert, 218, 224, 
240 

Spleen, Ode on the, 104 
Stecchetti, Lorenzo, 231 
Stone, Nicholas, 45 
Strangford, Lord, 247-250 
Suckling, Sir John, 85 
Sugar Cane, Grainger's The 
159 

Swift, Dean, 31, 175, 176 

Temple, Sir William, 210 
Thackeray, W. M., 229, 266 
Tom Crib, Moore's, 231 
Tom Jones, Fielding, 133, 165 
Tooke, Home, 208 
Tradescant, John, 55 
Traveller, Goldsmith's The, 
159 

Trotter's Fatal Friendship, 

Catherine, 125 
Turner, J. M. W., 209 
Tyers, Thomas, 156 

Ultr a-crepidarius, Leigh Hunt's, 

237-241 
Usurper, Howard's, 73-74 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 116, 189 
Vanbrugh's Msop, 189 
Vaugelas, 92-93 
Vaughan, Henry, 84 
Vayer, La Mothe le, 145 
Verlaine, Paul, 208 
Verrall, Dr. A. W., 159 
View of Christianity, Soame 

Jenyns', 207 
Voltaire, 7, 142, 156 

Waggoner, Wordsworth's The 
221 

Waggoner, Benjamin the, 221 
Walker, Anthony (Engraver), 
187 

Walpole, Horace, 165 
Walton, Izaak, 42 
Warburton, Bishop, 208-209 
Weston's A mazon Queen, 77-78 



Index 



277 



What Ann Lang Read, 131- 
137 

White, Rev. Gilbert, 195-201 
Wife to be Lett, Eliza Hay- 
wood's A, 136 
Winchilsea, Anne, Countess of, 

101-108 
Winstanley, William, 81-87 
Wither, George, 31-37, 86 



Wordsworth, William, 81, 101, 

208, 215-224, 231 
Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, 

208, 217 
Wright, Mr. W. Aldis, 211 
Wycherley, William, 77, 104, 

116 

Yalden, Robert, 198 



Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
brunswick street, stamford street, 
and bungay, suffolk 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 

PreservationTechnoIogies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



